na 

BE 

m 




1 



DHH 



I 




OFFICIAL RESIDENCES OF RULERS. 

1— The Vatican at Rome. 2— White House, Washington. 3— The Tuileries, Paris. 

4— Buckingham Palace, London. ELrKing's Falace, Berlin. 



THE NE¥ WORLD 



II Wa 

COMPARED WITH 



THE OLD: 



A DESCRIPTION OP THE 



AMERICAN GOVERNMENT, INSTITUTIONS, AND ENTERPRISES, 



AND OF THOSE OF OUR GREAT RIVALS AT THE PRESENT TIME, PARTICULARLY 



ENGLAND AND FRANCE. 



BY 

GEO. ALFRED TO WNSEND. 



gin fkgani @ttatw folanw, |II«sirate!& fonlr @ig^fg (ikgratouga. 



HARTFORD, CONN.: 
S. M. BETTS & COMPANY. 

CHICAGO, ILL., GIBBS & NICHOLS. 
PHILADELPHIA, PENN., JOHN BIGELOW & CO. 

NEW YORK, J. D. DENNISON. 
H. H. BANCROFT & CO., SAN FRANCISCO, CAL. 

1870. 



TFv*s 
•Tl 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1869, by 

S. M. BETTS & CO., 

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the 
District of Connecticut. 



PREFACE. 



The volume which is introduced by these lines is intended to 
diffuse cosmopolitan political information in as picturesque fashion 
as the subject will permit, or the author can present it. Much is 
said in our day about our position amongst states, and our privi- 
leges amongst peoples. I have tried in these pages to ascertain 
the truth under both heads, and I consider the three years I have 
spent in Europe as a poorer qualification for the task, than the 
access I have been so cheerfully accorded to the fine Library of 
Congress. 

The work was at times embarrassed by improvements in the 
institutions of Europe : by a change of front in the French 
Imperial Government, by the Revolution in Spain, by the unfin- 
ished condition of Germany and Italy, by the Disraeli Reform 
Bill, and by Gladstone's disestablishment of the Irish Church 
in the United Kingdom. The title of the book might more 
truly have been " The Old World Compared with the New," 
as what is described of America is mainly meant to arrest 
attention and fix the eye upon the successive European insti- 
tutions ; but the book will read either way, and it is not 
impossible that an Englishman might take it up and compare our 
civilization with his. The inquiry was so profitable to myself 
that I felt almost chagrin when I came abruptly to the limit of 
the volume, and, reading it over now, I remember much that I 
had intended to tell, sacrificed in the consciousness that one can- 
not bind the globe into a book. 



IV 



PREFACE. 



Perhaps that which impressed me most in this research was 
the superiority of European authorities upon America to our 
own literature of Europe. We have believed the contrary, and 
have made outcry upon foreign travellers and writers amongst 
us ; but we have never sent a De Tocqueville abroad nor appre- 
hended our own future with the intelligence of a Cobden. Our 
travellers in Europe have been mainly provincial in mind, and 
in observation superficial ; some of them write full of wonder, 
and some with lofty village scorn. The very best of our travel- 
lers was Fenimore Cooper, whom we berated for his frankness 
as heartily as we took our foreign critics to task. • In Haw- 
thorne, we sent one Consul abroad who looked about him, 
but wrote too little. In our diplomatic establishment there is 
scarcely one experience, save Jefferson's, which is marked by 
the fine contemporary analysis of both the politician and the 
traveller. Within the past ten years, however, several phil- 
osophic foreigners have become naturalized amongst us, and 
these have laid the foundation of an American political litera- 
ture upon Europe ; the tone of our foreign correspondence in 
the newspapers and reviews has also improved since the civil 
war, and we are throwing out of our schools those pernicious 
guides to a true estimate of continental politics, — histories of 
Europe based upon English opinion. 

For fifty j^ears our boys have been taught that Pitt's states- 
manship was the wisest, and Wellington's sword the brightest ; 
that the French devolution was only infidel and circumscribed 
by the w Reign of Terror," and that everybody but ourselves 
is incapable of Republican government. Against this English 
Toryism a reaction as baneful has been led by certain Ameri- 
can clergymen, sitting at the feet of Coesar, and these have cov- 
ered the land with indiscriminate praises of the Napoleons. 
Between the two schools, our youth escape altogether the mod- 



PREFACE. V 

erate period and party of continental Europe, which is in 
affinity with our own temper and institutions, and has sent 
hither the most intelligent and friendly travellers. The great 
names in political economy, reciprocity, and international phi- 
lanthropy have been lost to us in the rivalry of merely warlike 
reputations. Peel is obscured by Bismarck, and Alison is read 
instead of Martineau. Our Academies and Colleges would do 
well to begin the study of modern history with the year 1815, 
for all prior to that time will be read and retained by the student 
of his own will ; whereas the attention, carried up to a giddy 
climax in the story of Napoleon, relaxes at his downfall, and 
listens languidly to the w History of the Peace," which is the truer 
and more elevating history of our era and of European glory. 

The sole object of this comparison is to popularize political 
information, and wherever a quotation could be made judi- 
ciously, it has been preferred to original statement, as carrying 
authority, and as being, besides, a sample of foreign thought, 
idiosyncrasy, or oratory. Personal conviction upon disputed 
points has been evaded by citing opinion from both sides ; but 
the general conviction is retained throughout that we have the 
happiest government, and that only popular defection or neglect 
can overthrow it. The publishers have wished me to print a 
list of authorities consulted in the preparation of the book ; but 
this custom has been so frequently abused by writers who seek 
to establish authenticity merely by parading a catalogue, that I 
shall confine myself merely to some general indication of books 
still in print and procurable ; other authorities will be named 
in the text. 

Harriet Martineau's " History of the Peace " is incomparably 
the best and fairest book upon English affairs since 1815. It 
has been issued in an American edition of four volumes, 
specially edited by the author. 



YI PREFACE. 

The " Statesman's Year Book," annually published by Mac- 
millan and Co., of London, is a book of nearly eight hundred 
pages,- containing a succinct account of every government of 
note, and of the colonies of each, as well. 

Many hand-books of Church and State have been issued in 
England, and of these one of the cheapest is published by Mur- 
ray, London. 

The only political history of note in America is that of Jabez 
Hammond, " The Political History of the State of New York," 
in three volumes, and but few copies are now in circulation; 
it recites with impartial faithfulness the rise of parties between 
the close of the War of Independence and the death of Silas 

Wright. 

Dr. Edward Fischel's work on the English Constitution has 
been translated into English, and published by Bosworth and 
Harrison of London ; it is close, entertaining, and more cen- 
soriously just than similar English books. 

Libraries are all supplied with Benton's "History of the Work- 
ing of the American Government for Thirty Years," which is 
full on many points, and on some dogmatic. A very useful 
book on the " Laws and Government of the States and the United 
States " is that of William B. Wedgwood, published in 1866. 
New York. An abridgment of the United States Census and 
an abridged Blue Book have also been circulated by private 
publishing houses. 

The English Black Book is a caustic, partisan, and some- 
what sensational account of abuses, sinecures, and evils in the 
English political system; Jenckes's Report on the American 
Civil Service is a more careful book upon a part of the parallel 
subject. 

The political history of the Continent of Europe is to be 
found in an immense variety of publications, few of which are 



PREFACE. VH 

in English. Kinglake's sketches of parties in France are 
severe and bigoted, but in many respects just. On the French 
Church I have consulted the "Almanack du Clerge pour Van 
de Grace, 1867 ; " on legislation, politics, and finance, the 
works of Casimir Perier and Adrien Huard. 

A good book on Germany, particularly on North Germany, 
is much needed in America. I have read, in the French, 
Eugene Veron's History of Prussia down to the battle of Sa- 
dowa, with advantage. 

"Russia and its People," by Count Gurowski, is a pithy and 
savage book ; for a charming view .of citizen life in Russia, one 
cannot do better than to read Turgenieff 's novel of " Fathers and 
Sons, " nicely translated by Consul Schuyler, and published in 
New York. "The Russians in Central Asia," by Valikhanof, 
and Veniukof, is a book pertinent to our new Asiatic relations, 
and issued in English, London, 1865. The cheapest compen- 
dium of travel, railway fares, distances, steamship routes, cities, 
etc., to be found in Europe or America, is "Bradskaw's Special 
Guide for the Continent," imported by August Brentano, New 
York, every month, at the price of about three dollars, cur- 
rency. Other English guides to Europe are offensive and par- 
tisan, particularly Murray's ; and American guides to Europe 
are worthless, being based upon them. 

To conclude : many of the statistics cited here will be found to 
vary at different periods, and with different authors. The pub- 
lishers design to keep the book in these respects up to the latest 
information. I hope that some reader may grow interested in 
the great contemporary questions here discussed, and hold a truer 
mirror up to government, so that we may become larger politicians 
in the sense expected of a republican, who is at once a citizen 
and a sovereign. 



LIST OF ILLUSTEATIO^S. 



OFFICIAL RESIDENCES OF RULERS,* Frontispiece. Page. 

1. The Vatican at Rome. 

2. White House, Washington. 

3. The Tuileries, Paris. 

4. Buckingham Palace, London. 

5. King's Palace, Berlin. 

COUNTRY SEATS OF RULERS, ....... 37. 

6. Ulricksdal, Sweden. 

7. Windsor Castle, England. 

8. fontainebleau, france. 

9. Soldier's Home, Washington. 
10. Tivoli, Rome. 

HOUSES OF THE LEGISLATURES, . . V V Y . 83. 

11. Modern Capitol, Rome. 

12. Palace of the Corps Legislatif, Paris. 

13. Capitol, Washington. 

14. House of Parliament, London. 

15. Parliament Houses Ottawa, Canada. 

ECCLESIASTICAL EDIFICES, . . . .... 189 

16. Winchester Cathedral, England. 

17. Rheims Cathedral, France. 

18. Notre Dame, Paris. 

19. Trinity Church, New York. 

20. Interior of St. Paul's, London. 

21. St. Sophia's Mosque. 

22. St. Peter's, Rome. 

MONUMENTAL STRUCTURES, ....... 241. 

23. Alexander Column, St. Petersburg. 

24. Column Vendome. 

25. Arc De Triomphe, Paris. 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. IX 

26. Bunker Hill Monument. Page. 

27. Washington Monument. 

28. Statue of Columbus. 

Seats of municipal government, 282. 

29. The City Hall, New York. 

30. The City Hall, Paris. 

31. New City Hall, Baltimore. 

32. The City Hall, London. j 

33. The City Hall, Brussels. 

NATIONAL WORKS, . 317. 

34. Suspension Bridge at Niagara. 

35. The Victoria Tubular Bridge, Montreal. 

36. Pont Neuf, Paris. 

37. Chicago River Tunnel. 

38. Menai Bridge, Wales. 

MILITARY INSTITUTIONS, 344. 

39. Woolwich Academy, England. 

40. School of St. Cyr, France. 

41. West Point, New York. 

MONETARY INSTITUTIONS, 374. 

42. The Bourse, Paris. 

43. United States Treasury, Washington. 

44. The Bourse, St. Petersburg. 

45. The Royal Exchange, London. 

NATIONAL SHRINES, „ . 399. 

46. Fanueil Hall, Boston. 

47. State House, Philadelphia. 

48. Napoleon's Tomb. 

49. Tower of London. 

NATIONAL INSTITUTIONS, 469. 

50. Hotel Des Invalides, Paris. 

51. Hotel Dieu, Paris. 

52. Greenwich Hospital, London. 

53. Hospital at Cincinnati. 

REGALIA OF STATE, . . . . . . . . 496. 

54. Queen's Diadem. 

55. Queen's Coronation Bracelets, 

56. Prince of Wales Crown. 



-X LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 

57. Old Imperial Crown. Page. 

58. Queen's Crown. 

59 Spiritual Scepter. 

60. Temporal Scepter. 

61. Bishop's Hat. • 

62. Pope's Hat. 

63. Regalia of Scotland. 

GREAT STATE CEREMONIES, 528. 

64. The Fete at Venice. 

65. The Pope Blessing on Christsias Day. 

66. Coronation of the Queen of England. 

HALLS OF LEGISLATION, 572 

67. The Saloon of State, Paris. 

68. The Senate of France. 

69. The House of Commons, London. 

70. The House of Representatives, Washington. 

REPRESENTATIVE HOMES OF CITIZENS, .... 589. 

71 Palace of the Prince of Prussia. 

72 Duke of Wellington's Home. 

73 Chateau of Duke De Lynnes, France. 

74 Residence of A. T. Stewart, New York. 

75. Home of Bayard Taylor. 

HARBORS AND FORTRESSES 504. 

76. Ehrenbreitstein. 

77. Gibralter. 

78. The Narrows. 

79. Fortress Monroe. 

80. Citadel, Quebeo. 



CONTENTS. . ' 

CHAPTER I. 

WASHINGTON AND LONDON. 

Page 

Washington city and its onvirons, as seen from the dome of the Capitol — Reminis- 
cences of its site — Character of its outlying scenery — Permanence of the city 
as the political metropolis — London, seen from the dome of St. Paul's — Associa- 
tion of the great metropolis with American history and institutions — Ancient 
Rome and London in relative populousness — The Thames and the Potomac — 
London topographically considered — Relation of the great parlimentary suburbs 
to the old city — Relation of "the city" to the capital suburb of Westminster 

— Influence of the municipality upon the nation from the earliest ages — Im- 
pending improvements and the cost of them — Old monuments in London — The 
"season" of fashion and politics . • •_, • • • • • 21 

CHAPTER II. 

THE QUEEN AND THE PRESIDENT. 

Their comparative power, salary, place of residence, and attendants — English opinion 
of the White House — Sketches of St. James, Kensington, Whitehall, and Bucking- 
ham Palaces, and of Windsor Castle, Osborne House, and Balmoral Castle, the 
Queen's residences — The family of Victoria — Death of the King, her predecessor 

— Manner of her succession and "Proclamation" — Her dress when she first ap- 
peared before the people — Her first state ceremony — The girl become Queen — 
Her holding of the first court — The Queen going to Parliament to dissolve it — 
Minute account of the procession — The Queen's wardrobe — Her visit to London 
city and gorgeous reception there — Parliament votes her salary — Coronation of 
the Queen compared with the inauguration of our Presidents — Sketch of West- 
minster Abbey with the assembled peers, officials, and commons — - The Queen's re- 
galia — History and description of the crown and sceptre — Homage paid to her 

— Balls of inauguration and of coronation — How Prince Albert courted the 
Queen — The marriage ceremony in St. James' palace — Honeymoon at Windsor 

— A poor German prince grows thrifty after marriage — No objection on the 
Queen's part to becoming a mother — Royal house-keeping — Birth of the Prince 
of Wales — Death of the Prince Consort — Victoria's empire — Her influence upon 
the people — Permanence of her dynasty on the throne _. . . • .37 

CHAPTER III. 

THE BRITISH ARISTOCRACY. 

American " best families" — Vigor, number, and influence of the British aristocracy* 

— Its dislike of our institutions — Cotton creates a rival aristocracy — The dis- 

XI 



XII CONTENTS. 

senting church vs. the nobility — Disraeli's refusal to take a peerage — Origin of 
the aristocracy of England — Example of the pedigrees of British peers — Classifica- 
tion of nobles — Difference between princes, dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts, and 
barons — Meaning of each of these terms — Baronets and gentry, not noblemen — 
The prefixes "Sir" and " Right Honorable" — The oldest noble families of the 
present day — How nobles are created — The great expense of a nobleman — Priv- 
ileges of peers above other persons — The nobles of the royal household — The 
British nobility compared in power and purity of blood with those of other nations 

— Nobles who have been Americans — Splendid parks and baronial estates of the 
British nobles — The Marquis of Westminster, the Duke of Bedford — Burke's 
Book of the Peerage — The Cavendish family — The estates of Chatsworth and 
Blenheim described — N. P. Willis' description of a fortnight at Gordon Castle — 
"Town houses" of the peers — The dissolute nobility — Orders of British knight- 
hood — The Garter, Thistle, Bath, St. Patrick, Star of India — Complete identifi- 
cation of the nobility with the land — To destroy the aristocracy, tax the land . 62 

CHAPTER IV. 

THE SENATE AND THE HOUSE OF LORDS. ]/ 

Sketches of the United States Capitol building and of the British House of Parliament 

— The architects of the two edifices, and their cost — Incomplete character of both 
buildings — The Parliament Houses of Melbourne and Ottawa — Picture of great 
groups of bridges and palaces at Westminster — Origin of the site as a place of 
historic reminiscence — Defects of the Parliament Houses — The influence of the 
spot upon America — Minute account of the ornamentation of the House of Lords 

— The royal throne — The peers in their seats — Their number and distribution 

— The president of the Senate and the lord chancellor — The clerks, sergeant-at- 
arms, and ushers — Political feeling in the House of Lords — The Queen opening 
Parliament — Gorgeous scene in the House of Peers on state occasions — The re- 
porters' gallery — Noisy behavior of the Commons coming up to the Lords — The 
oath against popery — Duration of a Parliament — Riot in the presence of Wil- 
liam IV. — Passage of the reform bill over the heads of the peers — The trial of an 
impeachment — Warren Hastings — Lord Kingsborough — Literature of the aris- 
tocracy — Mrs. Yelverton — Earl Ferrers hanged — The Queen never comes to 
Parliament as a spectator — The veto power — Parliamentary law in the Senate and 
the House of Lords 83 

CHAPTER V. 

THE HOUSE OF COMMONS AND THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES. 

The architecture and dimensions of the chambers of both bodies — Their committee 
rooms, restaurants, and libraries — Number of members in the two assemblies — 
Members of Parliament paid no salaries — Scene when the Commons are assem- 
bled — Telegraph and reporting arrangements — The speaker's office and perqui- 
sites — Chairman of committee of the whole — Salaries of the clerks and the ser- 
geants-at-arms — Persons disqualified from sitting in Parliament — Congressional 
district? and parliamentary boroughs — Definition of a county, a corporate city, a 
borough, a university, — Rise and growth of parliamentary government — The reform ^\ 
bills of 1832-1867 — Number of voters in England — Bribery in parliamentary 
elections — Clubs and tho House of Commons — Instances of certain boroughs and 



CONTENTS. XIII 

their representation — English Boston, York, Hartford — Sir Morton Peto — 
Pleasant and honorable life of an M. P. — Gross cases of corruption — Quakers, 
Jews, and Catholics, in Parliament — Regular order of parliamentary business — 
Tho Budget — Expunging resolutions — Petitions — Pvespect for the Queen and our 
President in debate — The lobby — The official reporters — Printing of the debates 

— The Congressional Globe — The London Times — Excess of forms in Parliament 

— Stranger's gallery — Manners in Parliament — Riotous and disorderly behavior 

— Parliamentary ignorance — O'Connell — Crowing, hissing, and coughing in tho 
Commons — Castelar and the foreign orators compared with the British — John 
Bright — A comparison of American and British eloquence: Disraeli and Bancroft 
on Abraham Lincoln — Familiar sketches of Lords Derby, Stanley, and Russell 

— Sir Robert Peel, Cobden, and Disraeli — Prize fighters in Congress and Parlia- 
ment — Defects of the organization of the House of Commons .... 115 

CHAPTER VI. 

THE PRIME MINISTER AND THE CABINET. 

The prime minister of England compared with the President — Difference between par- 
liamentary and popular government — The Queen' relations with the prime minis- 
ter — The English government familiarly constructed in America — Politics and 
the prime minister — The President in cabinet meeting — Cabinet recognized by 
law in neither country — Names and salaries of recent cabinet officers in Eng- 
land and America — Unpopular cabinet officers — Duke of Wellington as a statesman 

— The aristocracy and the cabinet — The privy council and the English cabinet 

— Lord Chancellor Clarendon and his dishonesty — Sketch of the inauguration of 
General Grant and of Sir Robert Peel, prime minister — The bedchamber plot and 
Lord Melbourne — Andrew Jackson and Mr. Duane — A Presidential election and 
a change of ministry — Queen disagreeing with her prime minister — Objections of 
ministers to the Queen's leaving English shores — A regency — Salmon P. Chase 
quitting Lincoln's cabinet — Earl Gray retiring from his premiership — Mrs. 
Eaton and Jackson's cabinet — A. T. Stewart and the treasury — Lincoln's 
cabinet signing the act of emancipation — Wellington and the reform bill — 
The galaxy of prime ministers and presidents compared in ability — Pendleton's 
bill to seat cabinet officers in Congress — Impeachment of Andrew Johnson — 
Murder of Percival in Parliament — Pensions to prime ministers — Attempts to 
murder the Queen — Secrets of cabinet council — William Pitt and Gladstone — 
Bright on political selfishness . .... e ... . 150 

CHAPTER VII. 

CHURCH AND STATE. 

The Queen as the head of the established church — The Archbishops of York and Can- 
terbury — Their residences and salaries — Descriptions of various English cathe- 
drals — The bishops and deans of England — The Scotch established church 

— The Irish church before its disestablishment — Maynooth college — Struggle of 
dissenters — Ritualism — The difference in doctrine and form between the Estab- 
lished and the Roman Catholic church — Rise of the English church — The Ger- 
man and English reformations — Connection of the Protestant Episcopal church 
in America with the English church — The parish system and the payment of 
church rates — Agitation against the church — The state prayers of the church — : 
The Queen's chapel — Beauty of English parish churches — Livings and presenta-^ 



XIV CONTENTS. 

tions — Salaries of London preachers — Foreign cemeteries — Catholic church in 
America and England — Dr. Pusey — John Wesley — Gladstone's book on church 
and state — The Pope's council — Guizot and French Protestants — The Deity in 
the Constitution — Trinity Church, New York, and St. Paul's — John Knox and 
Calvinism in Ireland and Scotland — Aggressive movements of the people upon the 
church 189 

CHAPTER VIII. 
THE OFFICE-HOLDERS, AND THE OFFICES IN AMERICA -AND ENGLAND. 

Comparison of the departmental buildings of Washington and London — Whitehall — 
The new public offices of London — The colonial office — Meeting of Nelson and 
Wellington — New offices at Washington — Contracts for public buildings — Num- 
ber of officials in the two countries — The New York custom house — English judicial 
system — The attorney general — Salaries of Judges — Treason to kill a judge — 
Manner of conducting law proceedings in England — Coke and Raleigh — The Unit- 
ed States Supreme Court — Lord Chancellor as a judge — Master of the rolls — The 
records — Jail for bankrupts — The pol ice courts — Inspectorships — Commissions — 
American and English patent offices — Agricultural bureau at Washington — Sala- 
ries of clerks under both governments — British internal revenue — Blue books — 
State paper office — Trinity house — English post office — Coleridge and Sir Rowland 
Hill — The money-order system — Purchase of telegraph lines by government 

— Letters not inviolate in England — Plates of postage between America and Europe 

— Franking system — The evils and debaucheries of the American civil service — 
Mr. Jencks and Mr. Layard — Superiority of the British — Its construction and • 
management — Testimony of eminent Americans against rotation in office — Incompe- 
tentofficial salaries in America — Testimony of Mr. Browning — Houses for Ameri- 
can officials of high rank — Somerset house — Baneful desire for office under the re- 
public — Montalembert on this question . . . . . . . .213 

CHAPTER IX. 

NATIONAL ART AND EDUCATION. 

The national schools of England, and the public-school system of the United States — 
Statistics of both systems — Republican nature of American schools — The Philadel- 
phia high school — George Peabody — Ignorance in the British army, navy, and 
provinces — Conservatism of British schools and students — Sketches of the schools 
of Christ's Hospital, Charter House, Westminster, Eton, and Harrow — Yale and 
Harvard Colleges compared with Oxford and Cambridge — Charles Astor Bristed 
at Cambridge — Origin and association of English universities — Complete account 
of Oxford and Cambridge — Dissoluteness of life and thought there — Academi- 
cal costumes — Fellowships — Races on the Isis, Cam, and on lake Quinsigamond — 
Cost of education at Yale and at Oxford — Durham university — The London uni- 
versity — Toryism affected by the English students — Tom Brown at Worcester, 
Massachusetts — Tho libraries of the world — Trier- congressional library — The 
British Museum — Our sculptors and artists abroad — American medical colleges 

— The English Inns of Court — Tho Washington monument — Tho Richmond 
Washington monument — The Albert memorial in Hyde Park 241 



CONTENTS. ' XV 

CHAPTER X. 

LOCAL GOVERNMENT IN THE STATES, COUNTIES, AND PROVINCES. 

Indian names of states — Saxon names of English countries — The country abroad com- 
pared with the American state, in its mode of government, and connection with the 
central administration — The lords' lieutenant, and the governors — English sheriffs 

— Number of counties in England — Their origin — Their public buildings — Flog- 
ging in the state of Delaware — Description of Lancaster county, England — Varie- 
ties of provincial life — Gypsies and cricketers — The English "commons " and parks 

— Hold of the aristocracy upon town sites — Game in England — Use of small states 

— Gladstone on small boroughs — Justice of the peace — Superiority of the English 
justices — Municipal counties — New York state — Its growth into the powers of an 
independent commonwealth — New Albany state capitol — Government of New 
York city — The New York civil service list — Salaries of American state officers — 
The neglect of the people in their state duties as electors — Government of the Isle 
of Man — Channel islands — Scotch local government and courts of law — Scotch 
Judges and their salaries — The Stuart dynasty — The great emoluments of the lord 
lieutenant of Ireland — His privy council — Speculations upon English tyranny 
and Irish obstinacy — Causes of the quiet of Scotland and the discontent of Ireland 

— O'Connell — His objects, his glory, and his decline — Harriet Martineau upon 
his latter days — Happy and safe government of the states under a limited union 

— De Tocqueville on the use of states . 265 

CHAPTER XI. 

BRITISH PROVINCES AND PROVINCIAL CITIES. 

Jealousy of American cities — No municipal republics in America — Every city con- 
trolled%by its state — Contrary condition of English cities — What is a metropo- 
lis — Tour of the English cities — Bristol and Liverpool racing for supremacy — 
A verbal map of England constructed on the territory of the United States 

— Density of population in America and Europe — Relative measurement of 
the mountains and rivers — The environs of Boston and the environs of Lon- 
don — Picturesque* circuit of all the counties radiating from London — Ports- 
mouth, Southampton, Hull — Rise of Manchester and Birrninglmm — Relative in- 
fluence of Dublin and Edinburgh — Birmingham and Pittsburg compared — Low- 
ell described by Anthony Trollope — Our working people better off than the 
British — Bradford and Leeds — The woollen and cotton trade in America and 
England — York county and New York — Tariff and transit — The resemblances 
and differences of Glasgow and Edinburgh — River steamboats of Europe — Ship 
building — Railway system of Europe — Early history of Scotland — Broad gauge 
and narrow gauge — Cobden on the uniform gauge — Opening of the first railway 
in England — Opposition from the aristocracy — Excursion trains — Excitement 
over railway schemes in early days — The voyage from Wales to Dublin — Trinity 
College and Glasgow University — Phoenix Park and Central Park — Belfast and 
Londonderry — Irish flax — Orangemen and Ribbonmen — Literature of Dublin 
and Edinburgh — Dilke, or the Irish in American cities — Municipal reform bill 

— Great activity of American cities — Repose of the English towns . . . 282 



XYI • CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER XIL, 

BRITISH COLONIES AND AMERICAN TERRITORIES> 

A tablo of all the English colonies — Their mode of acquisition, area, exports, imports? 
and population — Area of the United States — European possessions of England — 
Heligoland — Ionia — Malta — Gibraltar — African establishment — Sierra Leone 
and Liberia — Pvoyal governors — The Abyssinian war — The American revolu- 
tion in its effects Upon the other British colonies — Taxation given up — 
Salaries of governors-general — Immense perquisites and salary of the gov- 
ernor of India — Kise of the British power in the orient — The East India Com- 
pany — Clive, Cornwallis, and Warren Hastings — Cornwallis after his surren- 
der at Yorktown — Residence of the governor-general of India — Russell's visit 
to him during the Sepoy revolt — Cause and effect of this revolt — Debt of In- 
dia — The Pacific and the India railways — English treatment of the Hindoos — 
Rottenness of the British empire in India — The governor-general's court — Colonel 
Parker and the Amerian Indians — Long talk with the Indian Commissioner — 
Thefts of Indian agents — Fate of the redskin — How we have acquired our terri- 
tory — Seward's plan of buying manifest destiny — Australia's peaceable settle- 
ment — Liberia our only colony — Filibustering — France in the new world — 
Do Tocqueville on the Anglo-Saxon in the new world — Population of America 
in 1870 — Table of population of the globe — Permanence of American territory — 
Fate of British colonies — George III. on bidding adieu to his thirteen colonies . ', 

CHAPTER XIII. 

THE BRITISH AND AMERICAN ARMY AND NAVY. 

Pride of the two Anglo-Saxon nations in their navies — Jealousy of their standing 
armies — The American army before and after the war — Dimensions of the Brit- 
ish army — Pay of officers —^ English militia, yeomanry, and volunteer^ — The 
army in Ireland — Military districts of the United Kingdom — The army in the 
colonies — Grants of money to volunteers — Our volunteer force in the war — 
The grades of general and admiral — The English commander-in-chief — His sal- 
ary, perquisites, staff, and dignities — Pensions and half-pay — Buying commis- 
sions — Wraxall on the aristocracy in the army — Military hierarchy — West Point 
and Annapolis *naval school compared with Sandhurst, Woolwich, and Dublin — 
General Garfield on West Point — Corps of royal engineers — Fortifications of 
England — The Stevens' battery — The Dutch at Chatham — Nelson's life, ser- 
vices, and character — Decatur — Collingwood — Wellington's reward for win- 
ning Waterloo — Julius Caesar and William the Conqueror invading England — 
Flogging in the army and navy — The Army and Navy Medical Museum at Wash- 
ington — Conscription — Relative navies of England and America — Description 
of Annapolis school and school fleet — U. S. steam sloop Wampanoag the swiftest 
in tho world — The right of search . . . . . . . . . ' 

CHAPTER XIV. 

BRITISH AND AMERICAN FINANCE. 

Debt of England at commencement of American revolution — Manner in which money 
was raised in American civil war — Salmon P. Chase and Jay Cooko — Chase 



CONTENTS. XVII 

banking system — Centre of gravity of English state government — " The budget " 
— Parliamentary Committee of Ways and Means — Of Supplies — Bank of Eng- 
land — Old U. S. bank — Treasury building at Washington — English Mint — 
Wall street, N. Y. — London Royal and Stock Exchanges — New York Stock Ex- 
change — Light house and coast survey bureaux — Revenue cutter service — Eng- 
lish commerce — Cost of railroads in England — Miles of railway in operation in 
United States in 1869 — Canals — Public buildings — Revenue — Civil service of 
U. S — Cotton — Tariffs, free trade, etc 374 

CHAPTER XV. 

POLITICS AND POLITICAL PARTIES ON BOTH SIDES OF THE SEA. 

History of English politics — Whigs — Tories — Jacobites, etc. — Federalists — French 
Revolution — Political demonstrations in England — Chartists — American mobs 
- — Young England — Radicals — American political traditions — Party spirit in 
England — " Know Nothings " — Free Masonry — Jews — Catholics — " No Po- 
pery M — Woman suffrage — Free trade — Trades unions — Popular hymn — 
Catholic vote — English elections — Reform bill % y . • 399 

CHAPTER XVI. 

THE PEOPLE AS AFFECTED BY THE TWO GOVERNMENTS, 429 



CHAPTER XVII. 

AMERICA AND ENGLAND AS INFLUENCED BY EACH OTHER. 

England and America as allies — Causes of mutual estrangement — Malevolence of an 
aristocracy for a republic — American scholarship at Oxford and Cambridge — Brit- 
ish comment on American history — French writers on America — Mrs. Trollope 
— Her son Anthony — Democratic institutions — American fascination of the 
higher social life of England — Ingenious passage from De Tocqueville — Progress 
of population of the U. S. — Influence of England upon America \% • • 453 

CHAPTER XVIII. 

NEW YORK AND PARIS. 

From Washington to New York compared as a journey with the transit between Lon- 
don and Paris — The Chesapeake and Dover straits — The Rhine and the Hudson — 
The valley of the Seine from Paris to Havre — New York bay from the battery to 
the sea — Paris and its amphitheatre of hills — Unique position of New York isl- 
and — Staten Island and Rouen — Naversink and Havre — Brooklyn and the 
Quartier Latin — Origin of Paris — Origin of New York — Hotel de Ville and 
City Hall — Administration of Paris — Patriotism and intelligence of the city — 
Revolution in the streets — The New York riots — Cost of Napoleon's improve- 
ments — The parks of New York and Paris — Social life — Broadway and the 
boulevards — Relative influence of the two cities upon their nations . ... . 469 



XVIH CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER XIX. 

NAPOLEON III, AND NAPOLEONISM. 

The French Emperor and his history — Rise and times of his family — Napoleon Bona-' 
parte and his brothers — Louis Bonaparte and Hortense Beauharnais — Private 
life of the Queen of Holland — Her natural son, DeMorny — Separates from her 
husband — Birth of Louis Napoleon in the Tuileries — His school-life at Arenen- 
berg — Goes to school in Bavaria — Joins the revolt against the Pope — Death of 
his brother, and his elevation thereby to the successorship of the Emperor — He 
grows moody — Becomes an author — His descent upon Strasbourg — His capture 

— Attracts the sympathy of the Bonaparte party in France — Persigny — Louis 
sent to America — Visits the Murats in Baltimore — The American Bonapartea 

— Jerome and Miss Patterson — Joseph at Bordentown — Lucien, high-minded, re- 
fuses to divorce his wife — Singular behavior of Mrs. Patterson Bonaparte — Louis 
recalled to Arenenberg by his dying mother — Is he the son of the King of Hol- 
land ? — His residence in London — Descent upon Bologne-sur-mer — He is sent to 
the fortress of Ham — Authorship — Growing name in France — Escape — Life in 
London — The Revolution of 1848 — Visits Paris — Elected to the Assembly — 
His sincerity suspected — Persigny and De Morny have him elected President — 
"Prince President" — Ho disgusts the republicans — Occupies Rome — Dissen- 
sions — The coup d'etat — Terrible scenes in the streets — Fight at the barricade 

— Voting by plebiscite — The coup d'etat endorsed — The Crimean war brought 
about — Results of the empire — The imperial family — The Empress — Mar- 
riage — Napoleon's recent authorship — Sketches of his satraps — Mexico and 
Maximilian — His various palaces — His industry — Birth of his child — His moth- 
er's grave — FontainebleauandCompiegne — Author's visit to Compiegne in 1864 496 

CHAPTER XX. 

THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT. 

Extraordinary number of officials on the European continent as compared with Amer- 
ica — Gauses of it — 'A personal versus a popular government — Definition of bureau- 
cracy or vielrecjieren — Number of French office-holders — The Emperor's household 

— De Tocqueville on gratuitous functionaries — Napoleon's proposed reforms — Dif- 
ferences between the French limited monarch and the American executive — The 
present French constitution — The French cabinet — Salaries — The Moniteur — 
French senate — The Corps Lcgislatif — Number, qualification, and term of mem- 
bers — A table of the governments of the world, showing the population to each rep- 
resentative and the proportion of members of the lower and the upper house — French 
aristocracy — The legislative palaces — Appearance of the Corps Legislatif sitting — 
The legion of honor — Table of representative official salaries in France and Amer- 
ica — Education in France described — The imperial university — The Sorbonne — 
Religious toleration full and complete — Strength of the French Protestants — 
French charities — Hotel Dieu — Foundling hospital — Polytechnic school — The 
institute of Franco — Free Masonry in Franco — New York and Notre Dame cathe- 
drals — Napoleon's gift to the Pope — The Catholic hierarchy in France and their 
ealarics — Consuls and ambassadors of France — Management of railways on the con- 
tinent — French post-office and telegraph — Police, garrison, firemen, national 
guards, and fortifications of Paris — Monetary and metrical system — Gobelines fao- 



CONTENTS. xtx 

tory — Government regulating bread — Pensions — The great stock enterprise 
of France — Credit Fonder — Credit. Mobilier — Comptoir National — Caisse de 
Retraites — French judicial system and the salaries of judges — Spy system — 
Lawyers — The Morgue — Palais de Justice — Prefect of the Seine — Prefect of the 
Police — Prisons — The guillotine — Scene in a Parisian police court — Arrest and 
brutal treatment of an American in the Paris riots of 18G9 — Paralyzing influence 
of a too beneficent government — " We are governed too much " . . .528 

CHAPTER XXI. 

POLITICS AND POLITICIANS OF FRANCE AND THE CONTINENT. 

Europe compared to a crab — France the nerve of the continent — Causes of French in- 
fluence in Europe — International jealousies -/The imperial party of France — 
Victor Hugo and Kinglake on the Emperor's party — De Moray, the Emperor's 
natural brother — Persigny, the Emperor's wire-puller — Guizot on Persigny — 
Fleury and Maupas — £)uruy the Protestant — Drouyn de L'huys — Thouvenel — Eu- 
genie interfering with government — The Pope and his friend in petticoats — The 
Prince Imperial or ' l little Prince " — His advent in politics — The Napoleons as au- 
thors — Lucien — Louis — Achille Murat — Sketch of St. Arnaud — The Bourbon 
and the Orleans party — Origin of the House of Bourbon and of the Orleans branch 

— Comparative social respectability of Bourbon and Bonaparte — The expulsion 
of the last Bourbon — The French clergy — Gallican and Ultra Montane parties 

— Montalembert — Count de Chambord or Henri V. — Count de Paris, the heir of 
Louis Philippe — Aide-de-camp to General McClellan — The Orleans party the 
true moderate republican party — Confiscation of their property — Sketch of Ber- 
ryer the advocate — "Henri ! mon roi !" — Guizot the Protestant — Thiers — 
Girardin — Picard — Pelletan — The French press — Difference between journalism 
in America and France — The French republican party — Its mortal hatred for 
Louis — Jules Favre — Superiority of French to American congressional orators — 
Communism explained — Socialism — Sketch of Louis Blanc — National workshops 

— St. Simon and his gospel — Fourier and his American disciples — Comte and 
the positive philosophy — Ernest Benan — Stephen Girard and socialism in Amer- 
ica — Hepworth Dixon on American " isms" — Impending socialism here — French 
aesthetic enthusiasm — Edwin Forrest and Eugene Delacroix — Napoleon on Benan 

— How Persigny elected Napoleon -2$Jhe French elections of 1869 — Political meet- 
ings in France — Italy's influence upon Europe through Mazzini and Co. — Italy 
and the Latin race — Municipal republicanism — Life of Garibaldi — The red- 
shirt and the imperial purple — Notice of De Tocqueville — Free Trade and tariff 
in France — Chevalier — Bastial — The politics of the continent — Sensitive con- 
figuration of Europe — Ebullition of races — Pan-Sclavism — Greek versus Catholic 

— The Czar and the Kaiser — Pan-Italianism — Greek aspirations — Pan-German- 
ism — Pan-Scandinavianism — The state of Austria — General discontent through- 
out Europe and movement for reorganization upon the basis of homogeneity — 
" Balance of power," and the crimes done in its name — Superior happiness of 
America, and the immigration she attracts by her unembarrassed condition . 555 



XX CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER XXII. 

A GENERAL VIEW OF CONTINENTAL FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT. 

Tables of the national debts of the world — The rate of interest and the per capita tax 

— Proportion of interest to principal — The exports and imports of the great na- 
tions — The revenues, expenditures, and cost of government per man of the states 
of the world — A running notice of every dynasty and government in Europe — 
The lawsuit of the King of Hanover against the King of Prussia — The Russian 
army and navy — The great cities of middle and eastern Europe, and their sites and 
populations compared to those of America — The Zollverein — Rise of the great 
banking-houses of Europe — Intimate origin of the House of Rothschild with the 
American revolution — Sketch of the Rothschild family — American securities — 
The river and railway systems of the continent — War in Europe and the panics of 
it — Sketches of continental statesmen — The American statesmen of European 
model — Straightforwardness of our diplomacy — Maxims of Washington and Jef- 
ferson — Ample ability of our resources and our institutions to meet our obliga- 
tions and to provide for any political contingencies «, * . . .589 

CHAPTER XXIII. 

TTIE NEW WEST AND THE NEW EAST. 

Advent of the United States upon the Pacific Seas — Her competition with Europe in 
the trade of China, Japan, and India — State of the issue at the present time — 
The Burlingame mission — The Japanese in America — Sketch of the present 
operations of Russia, England, and France to anticipate each other in the affec- 
tions and interests of the East — Explanation of the " Eastern question " — 
Notes upon the efforts of Prussia to become a maritime power — The German 
war of 1866 and its results — Italy and Greece as maritime powers — Comprehen- 
sive picture of Russia — Her influence in Asia — Her civilization as compared 
with ours — The cities of Russia — Chicago compared with Odessa as a grain port 
— Astrachan and Omaha — Egypt, Turkey, and Persia as used by European diplom- 
atists — Impending crisis of British India — Napoleon casting ambitious glances 
toward Panama — Importance of America holding that isthmus — A general 
sketch of the Pacific Ocean — Wealth, trade, and alliances of Japan, China, Hong 
Kong, the Philippine Islands, Cochin China, Malacca, Sumatra, Java, Borneo, New 
Guinea, Australia, and New Zealand — The Pacific slope of the United States 
— San Francisco and Puget sound versus Sydney and Melbourne — Popularity of 
America in the East — Condition of our shipping — Adaptability of a republic 
to receive all races and make them all free and useful — The Monroe doctrine 

— Future of the two hemispheres 604 

CHAPTER XXIV. 

EUROPEAN AMERICA. 

A sketch of South America and West Indies and of American influence in them — Bra- 
zil particularly considered and English commerce in the Southern American seas. 632 



CHAPTER I. 

WASHINGTON AND LONDON. 

A comparison of the capital cities of America and England. — Their conception, growth, 
public buildings, political and commercial influence, benefactors, revulsions, tragedies, 
and social and intellectual advantages. — Probable future of Washington and London. 

If the reader will stand on the dome of the Capitol at Washing- 
ton, he will see beneath him the American nation in epitome. The 
broad, clear, shallow river between whose forks the capital city lies, 
was named by the Indians, whose nomenclature survives them in the 
streams, lakes, and mountains of the land. Across the Potomac lies 
Virginia, named for the invincible Virgin Queen, in whose reign 
Shakespeare wrote, Spain decayed, and the English planted in the 
New World. On the other side is Baltimore, almost within view, the 
metropolis of what was once the colony of the Stuart Catholics, and 
named for their protector. The counties of Maryland and Virginia, 
which enclose Washington, are further suggestive of the simple origin 
of the State. In Rappahannock, Shenandoah, and Alleghany, we 
hear the sounds of the sparse aboriginals, beyond whose era lived 
here no clearly defined human species. In Fairfax, Fauquier, and 
Loudon, we recall the proprietors and patrons of early English colo- 
nization. Charles, Prince William, and Prince George were of the 
royal families whose subjects immigrated here, and Clarke, Jefferson, 
and Washington were of the first great generation of native men who 
founded the independent republic. The capital city, like the nation, 
has been born within the memory of living people. The last of the 
old folks who saw vessels filled with stone for building the " Depart- 
ments " come up the Potomac, the archives of the infant state landed 
near by the base of the Capitol, and the dignified figure of Washing- 
ton enter the suburbs of the embryo and swampy city, is not yet de- 
ceased. There were people at the funeral of Lincoln who remem- 
bered the funeral of Washington. They or their immediate parents 
talked with the Indians who held an annual council on the banks of 
the little creek, Tiber, which winds round Capitol Hill. The memory 
of one man can swing from that time of primitive government to 

21 



22 THB NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

this, — when thirty-five millions of people, living- n two oceans and 
in two zones, are represented in Washington, and their consuls and 
ambassadors are in every port and metropolis of the globe, — from 
the pine wilderness to the government city, from the lonely farm of 
Davy Burns to the solid habitations of a hundred thousand people, 
having little other vocation than what the state affords them. 

The landscape oi y the city is new, crude, and imposing, like the 
nation. The dwellings are ot^ mixed and indifferent construction, — 
quadrangles o\ % red brick run up and covered with roofs of the once 
cheap cypress shingle, some pretentions, some durable, many of 
mere plank or plaster, and heterogeneous of form as of material ; 
here the newly-imported French Mansard roof, there an attic coated 
with patent-right contrivances of tar and pebbles, or dark-bine slate 
from the quarry. Porticos, balustrades, verandas, bay-windows, 
and church-spires, eked out between the carpenter and the architect, 
are revealed above and amidst the mass. The suburbs are plentiful 
with cabins or M shanties ; " many vacant lots are disclosed : the up- 
turned soil has the dark virgin colors : and looming here and there 
through the tranquil tenements the monumental offices of the govern- 
ment are seen, — the long, granite facade of the Treasury, the white 
porticos of the Patent Office, the red sandstone towers of the Smith- 
sonian Institute, the mansion of the President, and the plainer build- 
ings of war. navy, and state. At last, beneath the spectator's feet, 
the Capitol itself, enthroned within sight of all the lofty amphitheatre 
of ridges which environ Washington, salutes them with the statue of 
Freedom, poised serenely upon its shield and sheathed sword, beauti- 
fully nondescript, like the hopefulbut undeveloped destinies of the state. 
If this figure of bronze, which faces Eastward, toward Europe, could 
remember and speak, it might explain why every hill-top in the hori- 
zon is capped with a freshly dismantled fort, and tell of recent days 
when the tranquil navy yard, under its shadow, was surrounded with 
transports and ships-of-war, coming and going silently in the night, 
the city by day with cannon. Civil war, vigorous as the 
nature of our institutions, has already made the 1 3 of the 

capital I . and once in our brief history a foreign enemy has 

it the public buildings to the ground. Personal tragedy has con- 
ited the streets of the city. Eighteen magistrates have presided 
here. As tar as human anticipations may go, Washington is vindi 
i the seat of government, and by material and inspired con- 
siderations is to remain the American capital. 



WASHINGTON AND LONDON. 23 

The city was conceived in the opinion of the wisest founders of the 
state that a free legislature should sit remote from the violence and 
temptation of great commercial cities. It was fixed midway be- 
tween interests which threatened in the beginning to take sectional 
outlines and organizations. The love of Washington for the neigh- 
borhood of his estate and his preference for this spot decided the pre- 
cise site of the city. It was called in his honor, with the consent of 
the legislature, and surrounded with a small municipal district named 
for the discoverer of the American continent. That its grave and 
ardent founders did not project a capital for a century, but for all 
time, is seen in the spacious and effective ground-plan of the streets 
and squares, for which our impatient generation has not provided 
consistent buildings. But without manufactures, or foreign com- 
merce, the sequestered city now stands eleventh in the land in rela- 
tive populousness, and the ratio of its increase at the present time is 
greater than that of any Eastern American city, except Philadelphia 
and New York. Essentially what its founders meant it to be, a city 
of public offices and residences, it is idle to speculate whether Wash- 
ington will ever become a busy metropolis, in the sense of trade and 
physical industry. It is inland, without accommodation for deep 
ships ; but it has coal and reliable water-power near by. Baltimore 
has outstripped it in accumulation of capital and in enterprise, and 
although Washington is better placed commercially than Paris, 
Vienna, or Berlin, its established rivals, its need of stable public 
spirit, and the friendlessness of it in the national councils, will prob- 
ably make the social and intellectual delights its chief attractions. 
Unlike Rome, 

" That sat upon her seven hills, 
And from her throne of beauty ruled the world," 

Washington is actually governed by its transient occupants, Con- 
gress having exclusive jurisdiction over it ; and what little experience 
the city has had in self-government is of doubtful example to the 
state. At present there is universal manhood suffrage in Washington, 
whites and blacks sitting in the two councils, and the mayor is elect- 
ive. But it rests within the discretion of the dominant Congress to 
abolish the city government at any time, and resume exclusive ad- 
ministration over all the District of Columbia. The suggestion has 
been frequently made that the municipal city should be governed by 



24: THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

a commission of private citizens, unsalaried, like those who compose 
the boards of trustees of many colleges and bequests, or administer 
the Central Park, of New York. It matters little to the country at 

large how the resident people of Washington live politically, 

whether they demonstrate, as at present, a crude and unqualified 
municipal democracy, disfranchised nationally, or become representa- 
tive, like the empire at whose head they live ; but all our tastes, 
patriotisms, and sensitivenesses are concerned in seeing the capital 
made worthy of the land, its avenues paved, its hospitalities im- 
proved, and the unsightly environs of its public buildings made 
healthy and picturesque. We need not have an embellished capital 
city ; we should have a neat one ; less is required to be added than 
to be finished. The work, however, moves on apace, and it may be 
doubted at present whether the scholar, the man of social tastes, 
wealth, and leisure, can find in America a more congenial residence 
than Washington, — New York and Boston not excepted. 

This city, therefore, is the deliberative evolution of original 
Christian republicanism. No oracle commanded it. No augury 
fixed its site. It was not countenanced by flights of sacred birds, 
like Rome, nor were its foundations baptized in blood. Its only 
Virgil has thus far been the humorously servile Irish poet, Tom 
Moore, creating contemptuous satire upon Washington, for the aris- 
tocratic market ; and in view of the influence of this capital upon 
mankind, we may almost accept with pride his statement: 

" And what was Goose Creek once is Tiber now." 

From this clear sky of Washington, and almost limpid atmosphere, 
bringing near the eye the distant green forests and the bare gray 
heights, showing every roof and object in the basin of the city, and 
suggesting exquisite sites and opportunities for future growth, let 
us abruptly change the scene to the capital of the British empire. 

Standing on the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral, London lies beneath 

us in the pall of smoke and fog, its outlines lost like its origin, 

the vague suggestion of its mighty self, like the smoke of °a vol- 
cano. 

Here is the capital of that empire from which our own is most 
directly derived. The eyes of the men, who, with sheathed swords, 
stood round the corner-stone of Washington city, had often looked 
with earnest though outraged loyalty toward this ancient metropolis. 



WASHINGTON AND LONDON. 25 

Here was the habitation of the American sovereign. Here deliber- 
ated the parliaments which made laws affecting every ship, every 
trunk of ship timber, every pound of tobacco, and ever} r ounce of 
gold and silver in America. Hence came the yearly parcels of books 
which Washington read in his childhood, and Franklin noticed in his 
newspaper. The London pamphlets and journals were their New York 
and Chicago " Tribunes," their u Nation, " " Independent," " Atlan- 
tic," and " New York Ledger." The " sights " they talked of were all 
in London, — Westminster Abbey, the Tower, Temple Bar, St. James's 
Palace. Here were the spiritual leaders of the leading American sects ; 
hence came the great preachers and bishops to Newport and Philadel- 
phia. Brad dock, Wolfe, Abercrombie, and the military commanders of 
our forefathers received their commissions here, and their aspirations 
were like Nelson's, for " a peerage or a tomb in Westminster Abbey." 
Here Pocahontas kissed the hand of the sovereign of* Virginia, John 
Smith read the proof-sheets of his exploration of Chesapeake Bay, 
Franklin came to receive insult while he pleaded for the rights of 
Pennsylvanians, and Washington's modest recital of his trip to the 
Ohio was here committed to the printer and the bookseller. As the 
ancient world looked to Rome with obedience or fear, those looked to 
London. It was the birthplace of the English Bible and prayer-book, 
the grave of Bunyan and Milton, the theme and theatre of Shake- 
speare. We have not lived, we shall not live, to see the American 
city which can be the London to us that this was to our forefathers, 
or is to the existing Englishman. Around it lie the associations of 
nearly twenty centuries, stretching back to the page of Tacitus. 
Here it stood, doubtless, when the idle procession followed Jesus, 
bearing his cross to the hill of crucifixion in Jerusalem. When the 
sovereign in London declared war against France or Spain, the 
drum beat along all our Atlantic and frontier settlements, our 
privateers put to sea, and our women dreamed of painted savages 
marching down from Canada and Louisiana. The scandal of the 
court that was talked by our ancestors — the latest favorite, the 
revolting execution of the latest traitor, the beauty of the lord 
mayor's daughter — brings vividly before us the apparition that Lon- 
don was to the imaginations of our great grandparents. In every 
American town some giddy head was full of the freshest toilet worn 
at Whitehall palace ; some grim dissenter or embryo republican de- 
nounced the profligacy of the court ; and, over all, the intense sen- 
timent of subject toward king prevailed, that which we faintly 
4 



26 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 






revived in the American word " loyalty/' during the recent rebel- 
lion. 

Let us stand here, on St. Paul's, as we stood on the dome of the 
Capitol at Washington, and look upon London, as if by some mira- 
cle it had been swept of fog and smoke, and lay beneath us dis- 
tinctly. 

A dense mass of red-tiled houses and blackened chimney-stacks, 
ten miles long and six miles wide. Ten miles to go without the 
sight of a green field ! Six miles from hedge to hedge, from bird to 
bird ! This is at least three times the size of New York Island, and 
ten times the size of the actually settled city of New York. All 
this wonderful extent of houses, in which lodge every night three 
million six hundred thousand people, — the greatest city of the modern 
world, and perhaps the greatest of history in population,* — stretches 
in solid parallelogram on both sides of a river which takes the same 
general course as the Potomac, flowing south-eastward. Washington 
lies in the "fork" of the Potomac and Anacostia, about a hundred 
miles from the Chesapeake Bay ; London may be said, in like manner, 
to lie in the fork of the Thames and the little River Lea, sixty miles 
from the English Channel. The tides rise and fall ten miles above 



*It may bo the wish of some reader to know the populousness of London and Rome, in 
their highest prosperity, relatively. I therefore subjoin the following from Dr. Lord's 
"Old Roman World." 

"The city of Rome virtually contained between three and four millions of people. 
Lipsius estimates four millions as the population, including slaves, women, children, and 
strangers. Though this estimate is regarded as too largo by Mcrivale and others, yet how 
enormous must have been the number of the people when there were nine thousand and 
twenty-five baths, and when those of Diocletian alone could accommodate three thousand 
two hundred people at a time. The wooden theatre of Scaurus contained eighty thousand 
seats; that of Marcellus would seat twenty thousand; the Coliseum would seat eighty-seven 
thousand, and givo standing space for twenty-two thousand more. Tho Circus Maximus 
would hold three hundred and eighty-five thousand spectators. Lipsius estimates the cir- 
cumference of the city at forty-five miles, and Vopiscus at nearly fifty. The diameter of 
the city, according to Strabo, must have been eleven miles. 

" The Coliseum alone would scat all the male adults of tho city of New York. At 
the Circus Maximus more people witnessed tho chariot races at a time than are nightly as- 
sembled in all the places of public amusement in Paris, London, and New York combined, 
— more than could bo seated in all the cathedrals of England and Franco." 

According to more critical testimony, London has already passed Rome in population, if 
not in superficial measurement. The estimate of the population of London, in this book, 
is based upon its probable increase by 1870. In 18G1 it contained two millions eight hun- 
dred thousand people. Modern London covers seventy-eight thousand acres of ground, or 
one hundred and twenty-two square miles, which, according to Mr. P. Cunningham, was 
half the area of Babylon. 



WASHINGTON AND LONDON. 27 

London, three miles above Washington. The River Thames, from its 
rills to the sea flows two hundred and thirty miles, the Potomac four 
hundred miles, or longer than all England proper. 

This River Thames, whose smoky course we see, passing by long 
arms or " reaches " under more than a dozen bridges, — a black, 
oozy, surly tide, charged with the refuse of three and a half millions 
of people, — is in great part responsible for the power of London. To 
our American eyes it seems a puny river, — a thousand feet from 
shore to shore, less than a fifth of a mile. The little steamers which 
run as omnibuses upon it, dropping their funnels at every bridge, are 
mere needles to our fine floating-palaces. Nevertheless, it has been 
more serviceable than any river in the world, and at this time six 
hundred steamers and three thousand sailing vessels belong to its 
waters, while forty thousand craft of steam and sail enter and depart 
from it every year. The Romans embanked it when they conquered 
England. Up its w T aters the Northmen pirates sailed on errands of 
robbery, and various little creeks, on whose sites London streets are 
now built, were used by these robbers to penetrate far into the coun- 
try. Since England became an independent kingdom, but one in- 
stance has occurred of a foreign enemy sailing up its channel, except 
as a captive. In 1815, the year Napoleon fell, — -when Washington 
lay in ashes, burnt by British perhaps from this very city, — the first 
steamboat was seen upon the Thames. It was named the " Margery," 
had been built in Scotland, and sailed nearly round England to reach 
London. The biggest ship which has ever been known to man was 
launched upon this little Thames, the u Great Eastern," and she safely 
put to sea, while we esteemed it a doubtful enterprise to send down 
the Potomac the United States frigate " Minnesota," after we had 
launched her from the Washington Navy Yard. It is this strong 
little stream which carries away from London one hundred and fifty 
millions of dollars' worth of exports every year. To accommodate its 
vast shipping enormous artificial docks have been excavated below 
the city, covering between four hundred and five hundred acres, and 
costing nearly a hundred millions of dollars. To keep the river deep 
dredging machines are constantly at work, which take millions of 
tons of ballast a year from it, and this alone sells for one hundred 
and fifty thousand dollars. The bridges across the Thames, one of 
which passes the stream by only three arches, cost from less than 
half a million to five millions of dollars, and one of them alone cost 
five-sevenths as much as the Capitol at Washington. A tunnel, which 



28 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

cost three millions of dollars, penetrates from shore to shore beneath 
the river bed, but this is neither as long nor as useful as the Chicago 
lake tunnel. The great marvel of this river is, that it has kept its 
channel clear aud deep for these two thousand years, never filled by 
the offal of the great nation on its shores, but equal to their industry 
now as in the beginning, the ocean welcomed by it twice every clay ; 
and though tawny and grimy with toil, it is as youthful, as generous, 
and as beneficent as ever, promising as hopefully for the eras and the 
empires which may succeed to its dominion. 

The valley of the Thames, in which London lies, is bounded by 

ridges of hills to whose distant bases the. vast suburbs extend, 

cities in themselves. From these hills one can look down into the 
great crater of smoke, with St. Paul's, on which we stand, showing 
its dome and cross three hundred and sixty-five feet above the 
ground, — as many feet as there are days in the year. The ground 
surface of the city itself is undulating, with a general elevation 
toward either ridge, and here and there, in the heart of the city, are 
abrupt eminences, chief of which is Ludgate, or the hill of St. Paul's, 
on which we stand. Looking through the dense mass of houses, we 
see few open squares or clearings of any kind, except to the west, or 
up the Thames, where a series of green parks begins at the elbow of 
the river, a mile from our feet, and stretches to the boundaries of the 
city. By these intersecting parks, St. James's, Green, and Hyde, one 
can walk from the Thames, nearly three miles westward to Kensington 
Palace, where Queen Victoria was born, passing on the way Bucking- 
ham Palace, where she resides, and St. James's Palace, where she holds 
her court. And at the point where this series of parks starts from 
the Thames, stands Westminster Palace, commonly called the Parlia- 
ment buildings, which corresponds to the Capitol of Washington, 
being the palace of legislation. Beside Westminster Palace is West- 
minster Abbey, the burial place of the monarchs of England, which 
was founded in the year 1221, or two hundred and seventy-one years 
before Columbus found America. Now, facing about, and looking 
east, as the river flows, we can see, half a mile from St. Paul's, on 
which we stand, a cluster of large buildings in the densest quarter of 
the city. The strange old hall, with a heavy face, mediaeval-looking, 
like a Flemish " Hotelde Ville," is the Guildhall, or seat of city govern- 
ment, corresponding to the city halls of New York and Washington. 
Near by it is a large, sculptured classical building, with a portico and 
pillars, which is the residence of the Lord Mayor of London. Be- 



WASHINGTON AND LONDON. 29 

tween these two are the Bank of England and the Royal Exchange. 
The bank has a capital of seventy-five millions of dollars ; the Ex- 
change building cost seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars ; and 
the Lord Mayor gets, besides his house, rent free, a salary of forty 
thousand dollars a year, or nearly double that of the President of the 
United States. The Guildhall was the seat of city government before 
Columbus was born, and London, as a corporation, is older than 
Spain or Holland as kingdoms. 

The eye of the observer, pitched from the dome of St. Paul's, will 
at once take in the contrary nature of this group of banks and city 
halls and the group of palaces first described. St. Paul's in the 
middle, the cathedral of the city ; Westminster a mile up the river, 
the seat of Parliament and the Queen ; the city hall and the banks 
down the river half a mile, — that is the position. 

Now, strictly speaking, the Westminster end is not in London at 
all, for of this mighty mass of habitations, enclosing three millions 
and a half of people, only about one-twentieth, or, in numbers, one 
hundred and thirty thousand people, live in the city of London. 
The rest is a grand series of suburbs, not subject to the city govern- 
ment, but ruled by the English ministry from their capitol at West- 
minster. London, the parent city, like a hoary patriarch, stands upon 
its ancient charter around Guildhall, surrounded by its offspring. 
Within the limits of its ancient walls, now destroyed, the power of 
its Mayor is confined. Grown rich, by the privileges and opportuni- 
ties of its charter, it is the seat of trade, banking, and exchanges, 
while Westminster, or the West End, is the suburb of the court and 
aristocracy, and the social resort of Londoners and Englishmen. The 
other suburbs are parasites and excrescences of these two, the City 
and Court. Across the river, from Court and City, are the suburbs of 
the poor, Southwark and Lambeth, with nearty the population 
of Philadelphia. North of London is the suburb of clerks and 
business people, Finsbury, with the population of Brooklyn. Down 
the river from London is the suburb of the sailors, Tower Hamlets, 
named from the famous old Tower of London, with nearly the popu- 
lation of New York. North of Westminster is the suburb of the 
tradesmen of the court, and those who like to snuff the air of gentil- 
ity, Mar3 r lebone, with the population of Boston and Chicago. West- 
minster itself has the population of Baltimore. Within the past 
year (1868) two new parliamentary districts have been established, 
Chelsea and Hackney. 



30 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

When we come to examine the plan of London streets, the task 
seems hopeless of conveying to the mind any methodized, memorable 
notion of them. Our American towns were mainly laid out deliber- 
ately by the surveyor, beginning with Philadelphia, which was appar- 
ently conceived in some revulsion of the mind of William Penn 
against the inscrutably mixed lanes of the neighborhood of his 
father's house in London. There are three American cities whose 
original streets make something of a maze, — Quebec, Boston, and 
New York, — but this is mainly due to the natural configuration of the 
ground on which they stand. As Boston and New York expand, 
however, their streets straighten and cross at right angles. Wash- 
ington city was carefully laid out by an engineer officer upon two 
plans : a city of streets, for the people to live upon, and a city of wide 
avenues to exhibit the public buildings to advantage. London is 
the growth of less deliberate times, and it is by reference to her con- 
ditions at various periods that we lay hold upon the successive evolu- 
tions of her thoroughfares. 

In the first place, there is old London, in the East, the walled 
city, and within its small circumference we find the most involved 
tangle of streets, adapted in part to the ancient enclosure ; for Lon- 
don Wall and Barbican are street names to this day, commemorating 
the defences ©n whose site they stand. Out of this mighty maze go 
the highways to the country, and they take the names of the gates in 
the wall through which they passed, such as Ludgate, Aldgate, 
Bishop's Gate, and Newgate. These country roads, pouring into 
London through the gates, converged upon the Guildhall, the seat of 
government. Other streets, running parallel with the walls, con- 
nected these gate streets ; but in the ancient time the right of thor- 
oughfare was not appreciated as now, and churches, abbeys, religious 
houses, and so forth, compelled people to go round them. Cities, in 
the sense of the middle ages, were gatherings of incorporated trades- 
men and artisans, called guilds or companies, somewhat like the 
present trades-unions. Guildhall means the council-hall of the 
Guilds. Therefore Old London was largely composed of .streets of 
tradesmen, slipping in between privileged reservations of churchmen, 
courtiers, and the like, and a host of streets still survives, indicating 
their former character, such as Cheapside, Cloth Fair, Threadneedle 
Street, and Hozier Lane. So we recall the religious houses of for- 
mer times in " Great St. Thomas Apostle's Cloak/' Paternoster Row, 
and Holy Well Street. Lombard Street, the centre of banking, takes 



WASHINGTON AND LONDON. 31 

name from Lombardy, the country of the Jewish bankers who settled 
in London after their expulsion from Italy and anglicize.cl the pawn- 
broker's three golden balls, the ancient arms of Lombardy. Jewry 
was the quarter of the poor Jews. The mansions and associations of 
noblemen, knights, and monarchs are revived in Knight Rider 
Street, Garter Lane, Earl Street, and Tudor Street ; and here, where 
we stand, the central and most lofty monunlent in London, St. 
Paul's, rests upon the foundations of successive Christian temples, 
reaching back to the seventh century and perhaps upon the site of 
heathen temples a thousand years further. This is the grandest 
Protestant. church in the world, as St. Peter's, at Rome, is the grand- 
est Catholic church. St. Peter's stands upon the supposed site of the 
martyrdom of St. Peter. And St. Paul, or his immediate disciples, 
are supposed to have been the apostles of Britain. St. Paul's and 
Westminster, the two poles of the mighty aggregation called London, 
were founded at the same time. Both have been rebuilt. In West- 
minster lie the early monarchs of England ; in St. Paul's her greatest 
commanders, Nelson and Wellington. Westminster, the city of the 
•Abbey church, may be called the capital of England. Guildhall, 
under the shadow of St. Paul's, may be called the capital of London 
city. 

Looking down from St. Paul's upon the dense and intricate old 
city, one can see the landmarks of the richest and most influential 
municipal corporation ever known to man, — a corporation of bankers, 
mechanics, tradesmen, and sailors, which by purchase or contention 
has wrested from the throne and the aristocracy repeated privileges, 
and moulded, jointly with the nation at Westminster, the present form 
of the English government. Holding the purse, the arts, and the mob, 
the centre of agitation and thought, the home of a sagacious and enter- 
prising democracy, the refuge of authors, orators, and politicians, 
London has preserved every privilege, substantial or ceremonial, to 
the present time. Within the walls of the city proper, her mayor 
takes precedence of the sovereign, and walks before him. A toll of 
two or four cents is still collected at the city gates upon the carts 
and carriages of all strangers. The old city has an income of two 
million of dollars a year. Twenty thousand " freemen " vote in her 
elections, or about one-seventh of her population. Nearly fifteen 
thousand houses are compressed within her ancient walls, whose 
combined rents exceed eleven millions of dollars, and land round about 
St. Paul's is worth five millions of dollars an acre. When night de- 



32 



THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 



scends upon the ancient city of London, her vast warehouses and 
multitudinous shops are deserted. One-half her people withdraw 
into the outlying suburbs. Her resident population grows thinner 
every year, while her lusty offspring without the walls increase and 
multiply continually. 

Dismissing the city of London as a separate subject, and consider- 
ing hereafter herself and her suburbs as an entirety under the general 
name of London, we observe that her principal thoroughfares run 
from east to west, and make the figure of an elongated hour-glass, 
as expressed in the following diagram : — 




>^Vo St. Paul. 



Cheapside. 




Curling within and around, and crossing this diagram, go twenty- 
eight hundred streets, whose added lengths make three thousand miles, 
traversed by five thousand cabs and omnibuses. Four hundred miles 
of telegraph wire and two hundred telegraph stations carry news 
between the three hundred thousand houses which compose the city. 
Four and a half millions of dollars are spent in cab fare every year 
by Londoners. Six million two hundred and seventy thousand let- 
ters are delivered to them yearly. Three hundred and sixty thousand 
gas lamps light their streets ; six thousand two hundred policemen 
patrol them. Her five hundred and fifty charitable institutions spend 
ten millions of dollars a year. The smoke of five millions of tons 
of coal, which prepares the food of her people, is seen to trail 
opaquely away thirty-two miles. Fifty millions of gallons of porter, 
ale, and spirits are consumed in London, which is five millions of 
gallons in excess of the water drunk. 

The water itself comes partly from the Thames, at once the sewer 
and the well of London, or it is brought by an artificial river thirty- 
eight miles, — less distance than by the Croton Aqueduct of New York, 
Two million one hundred thousand four-footed beasts are yearly 



WASHINGTON AND LONDON. 33 

sacrificed to the appetite of London. Ten million head of game and 
fish feed the same necessit} r . Thirteen thousand cows give milk for 
London. Eight hundred and fifty churches give prayers. Seven 
thousand lawyers give counsel. Twenty-five hundred bakers give 
bread. Fifteen thousand eating and coffee houses accommodate 
strangers, and five thousand drinking houses give beer and spirits. 

To these superficial statistics many of equal marvel might be 
added. As a port of revenue, London has no rival in the world. 
One-half the entire customs of England are collected at her piers, 
or nearly sixty millions of dollars a year, while Liverpool, next in, 
importance, collects only twelve millions. The entire income of the 
English government, derivable from all sources, is only six times the 
customs of London. 

Within the past twenty years the spirit of public improvements 
has been at work in and beneath London to increase the comfort of 
her people, to beautify, modernize, and enlarge her highways, and to 
obviate some of the evils arising from her slow, cumbrous, and 
monstrous evolution. Twenty-one millions of dollars have been 
spent in improved sewerage alone, between 1860 and IS 69. Fifty-six 
millions of dollars have been expended in underground railways, in 
embanking the Thames, and in many minor improvements. The 
public works of London, in progress or already completed, are more 
important than those of any nation in the world, America and France 
excepted. Her underground life is more wonderful every hour of the 
year than the proudest day of imperial triumph above the streets of 
ancient Rome. Through the old tunnel of the Thames the railway 
trains thunder at last. By pneumatic despatch the mails go almost 
with the promptness of thought across the city. 

Subterranean railways make the traversing of the great city no 
more than a walk around a block. One of these roads crosses the 
river twice on bridges which cost millions, to carry omnibus passen- 
gers at a few cents a head. And the sewers of Paris, which M. 
Victor Hugo has presented to literature with much vividness, are 
gutters to the sewers of London, w T hich are adapted to the rise and 
fall of tides, and are designed with almost the exquisiteness of the 
venous and arterial S3 T stem in man. 

The monumental aspect of London is heterogeneous yet huge, like 
the history and the eras it illustrates. St. Paul's cost nearly four 
millions of dollars, and was thirty-five years in course of construc- 
tion. The Crystal Palace, a pleasure house, near by London, cost 
5 



34 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

upwards of seven millions of dollars, which was, according to the 
architect of the United States Capitol, Mr. Clark, three-fourths the cost 
of the latter building. The finest private residence in London, Stafford 
House, cost with its furniture and paintings, one million two hun- 
dred and fifty thousand dollars. There are probably nearly as fine 
residences, exteriorly, in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. A 
single railway depot cost four millions .of dollars. The House of 
Parliament cost ten millions of dollars. The contents of the British 
Museum are probably more valuable than all the paintings, statues, 
libraries, and curiosities which can be collected in the United States. 
One boast of this institution is that its library of seven hundred thou- 
sand volumes (to which seventy-five thousand are added every year) 
contains twice as many American books as the best library in America ; 
the building in which all these are housed cost five millions of dollars. 
The oldest great monuments of London are the Tower, built by William 
the Conqueror ; the Temple, built a. d. 1185, and Westminster Hall 
and Abbey. Arches, obelisks, and statues illustrate almost every 
hero and reign. Yet London cannot be called a splendid city in the 
sense of art ; for her riches have always exceeded her tastes. Her 
monuments are more memorable by their associations than \fy their 
art. 

The city, as an apparition, is known throughout the world by its 
swarthy and vapory complexion, covered with fog and smoke en- 
tangled in each other, and sometimes the twilight usurps the place 
of mid-day ; highway robbery goes forth to do its work, and the 
lamps of gas burn consumptively. The political organization of Lon- 
don is further remarkable to us who live under simple municipal 
charters, sometimes embarrassed by State interference. It contains a 
"lordship," a " lieutenancy ," some thirty "villages," five "water- 
ing-places," four " boroughs," two " episcopal cities," three " towns," 
and it extends into four counties. 

The social and intellectual life of London embraces whatever 
leisure, taste, genius, riches, or profligacy can be contributed by the 
kingdom. The true " season" is at its height in spring, when the Royal 
Academy opens, court removes to London, the Queen holds drawing- 
room and levees, the opera commences, Epsom and Ascot races are 
hell, and Parliament sits. The newspaper and periodical reading of 
nearly the whole kingdom is supplied by London. The literature 
descriptive of London city is more extensive than all the literary 
remains of the ancients extant, and few modern nations or races 



WASHINGTON AND LONDON. 35 

have illustrated so many plays, novels, and histories as this city 
alone. Unlike Rome it has rivals, but the growth of their enterprise 
and immigration is matched by the natural increase of London, whose 
huge bulk exudes every year a city of the size of Providence, Buf- 
falo, or Cleveland. This is the leviathan city, the monster of the 
fogs. This is the metropolis of Protestantism. By the privileges 
of its charter and its sturdy spirit, it has in turn divided the nobles, 
defied the kings, and exercised hospitality toward oppressed man- 
kind, but notably toward oppressed Protestants. These, flying from 
France, from Flanders, from the German Empire, and from Savoy, 
brought money and skill to make their adopted city the banker, the 
silk-weaver, and the merchant of the world. It is by the vast for- 
tunes laid away in London that many of our American railways are 
built, and by the same assistance much of our war for the Union was 
maintained. 

We have in America no metropolis of corresponding influence, 
either achieved or in promise. It is not probable that we shall ever 
have an American London. The day of independent municipal re- 
publics seems to have gone by, and all our American cities maintain 
their local self-government with difficulty. In Paris the emperor's 
Prefect marshals the police ; in New York they are responsible to the 
legislature at Albany. London alone, of the great cities, administers 
herself after her ancient forms. 

But at their rate of progress, with their harbors so much more 
spacious and convenient to the sea, and with their enlightened public 
enterprise, it is to be apprehended that New York and San Francisco 
will become the chief ports of the two oceans, receiving and discharg- 
ing for that London of the New World : the rich and happy continent 
which lies between them, covered by a charter more excellent than 
London city's ! Those young and vigorous ports retain less treasure 
than London, perhaps, in their coffers, but it lies near by in the 
mine. Their arts and monuments are }^et crude, but their institutions 
are the masterpieces of Christian freedom and human charity. Their 
common schools, rooted in the law and the origin of the State, are 
fairer edifices in the sight of man's happiness and destiny than 
Westminster Abbey or Westminster Palace. London has no system 
of public schools conceived in the spirit of ours in America. Her 
private schools number sixteen hundred ; but ignorance, aggravated 
by the presence of an aristocracy, develops "from Saint James's to 
Saint Giles's " in those shapes of caricature and subserviency, crime 



36 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

and folly, which illustrate the pages of Dickens and his contempo- 
raries, and have no corresponding people in America. Except by her 
money and her trades, London does not influence America in any 
marked degree. The burden of influence is the other way. It is 
from Washington that the century is moved. 

I have made this sketch of London city for the purpose of local- 
izing the views I am to give of the British sovereign, parliament, 
and people. In subsequent chapters London will continue to afford 
us descriptions. 







COUNTRI skats OF RULERS. 

1 — Ulrieksflal, Sweden. 2 — Windsor Castle, England. 3— Fontainebleau, France, 

4— Soldiers' Homo, Washington. 5— Tiroli, Rome. 



CHAPTER n. 

THE QUEEN AND THE PRESIDENT. 

A comparative sketch of their ceremonies, dignities, public duties, places of residence, 
social amusements, salaries, powers, and personal influence in the state. — Description of 
the royal household: the birth, coronation, marriage, and family relations of the 
queen. 

The President of the United States is, if not so sacred, a more 
powerful personage than the Queen of England. His salary is 
twenty-five thousand dollars a year. Her private purse is three hun- 
dred thousand dollars a year. His perquisites are some bushels of 
coal to light his fires, a gardener or two, a couple of soldiers to guard 
his door, and he lives in a mansion which cost three hundred thou- 
sand dollars, and which is furnished once every four years at a cost 
of twenty-five thousand dollars. The Queen has many residences, 
the least of which cost more than the President's palace. Her minu- 
test household expenses are met by the state, a large number of 
courtly attendants and officials are attached to her person, and seven 
thousand six hundred picked troops take turns in guarding her. One 
million and a half of dollars every year are paid to support her vari- 
ous households and to pay her tradesmen's bills, and all her children 
receive separate incomes, sufficient to support their rank. 

Standing before Buckingham Palace and recalling the plain "White 
House " at Washington, we can account for Mr. Anthony Trollope's 
description of the home of the American Chief Magistrate. " The 
President's House," he says, " or the White House, as it is now 
called all the world over, is a handsome mansion fitted for the chief 
officer of a great republic, and nothing more. I think I may say 
that we have private houses in London considerably larger. It is 
neat and pretty, and with all its immediate outside belongings calls 
down no adverse criticism." 

The Queen has four palaces in London, all situated along the mar- 
gin of the great series of parks which reach from the Thames, at 
Westminster, to the environs of London. Kensington Palace, the 
Queen's birthplace, where she has resided only for short intervals 

37 



38 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

these many years, is an old brick edifice, near the outskirts of Lon- 
don. Buckingham Palace, her city res' 'ence, St. James's Palace, her 
place for holding court, and the fragment of Whitehall Palace, where 
she occasionally gives alms or hears prayers, are all situated upon the 
borders of St. James's Park, a kite-shaped enclosure of ninety-one 
acres. Each of these buildings is far more costly and elaborate than 
the President's House at Washington, and excepting the fragment of 
Whitehall they are all larger. But it may be doubted if either of 
them is so chaste, so exquisite, or so complete as the White House at 
Washington. St. James's Palace is a confused series of low brick 
tenements and saloons, of the exterior appearance of a group of bat- 
tlemented stables with a stack-yard in the middle. Kensington 
Palace resembles an old barn-like boarding-school or convent. Buck- 
ingham Palace is a huge, forbidding, blackened pile, repeatedly altered 
and enlarged, one front of which alone cost twice as much as the 
White House. Probably four millions of dollars have been expended 
in the construction and ornamentation of these four palaces. 

The President of the United States is permitted to take quarters 
for some months of the summer in a cottage at the Soldier's Home, 
a military asylum near Washington city. The Queen of England 
has, probably, a hundred castles, fortresses, and mansions which 
belong to the crown, and stand ready to open their gates at her 
will. 

But there are three palaces, especially, which are reserved for the 
Queen, and in which she spends all the time not given to London. I 
enumerate these palaces in the order of their importance. 

Windsor Castle. — An hour's ride by railroad from London, in 
the midst of a noble park and forest of twenty-three hundred acres, 
has been for seven hundred years a favorite residence of English 
sovereigns. It is a mighty castle on the River Thames, whose battle- 
ments and many towers are visible for a great distance. The royal 
standard denoting the presence of the Queen floats over the tallest 
tower fully half the year. A court-yard of vast dimensions lies within 
the castle, and upon this open many of the apartments. The cost of 
this ancient and vast structure cannot be ascertained, but, in 1824, 
to restore a small portion of it Parliament voted one and a half mil- 
lion dollars. The stables alone cost one hundred thousand dollars. 
Within this castle is St. George's Chapel, one of the most elegant 
Gothic churches in the world. A single apartment of Windsor is two 
hundred feet long and thirty-four broad, or nearly three times as 



THE QUEEN AND THE PRESIDENT. 39 

large as the celebrated East room at Washington. Here, the greater 
part of the life of Victoria has been passed, and for several years the 
Queen has been seen but a small portion of the } T ear at her London 
palaces. 

Balmoral Castle. — The scene of many of the domestic events 
related in the Queen's recent books. This castle is entirely modern, 
and was built by Queen Victoria in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, a hun- 
dred miles north of Edinburgh, or upon the latitude of Labrador and 
Hudson's Bay. The Scotch Dee River runs beside it. It is a hun- 
dred and twenty by two hundred feet in dimensions, built entirely of 
granite in the Scotch baronial style, with a single tower at one end 
thirty-five feet square and one hundred feet high. The ballroom is 
the principal apartment, being sixty-eight feet by twenty-five in di- 
mensions. Behind this castle rise the Grampian Hills, where Ner- 
val's father fed his flocks ; some of the peaks of which are upwards 
of four thousand feet high. Balmoral was designed by Prince 
Albert, Queen Victoria's husband, who purchased it for the royal 
children, w T ith thirty thousand acres of farm and mountain land near 

by. 

Osborne House. — After Windsor, the favorite country house of 
the Queen, on the Isle of Wight, within the lovely harbor called the 
Solent, and overlooking Southampton water ; here pass many lines 
of steamships, and notably the Hamburg and Bremen steamers from 
New York.' Cowes, the town near by, is the head-quarters of the 
English Yacht Club, and here the American yacht " Henrietta" dropped 
anchor after winning the race across the Atlantic in 1867. Osborne 
was originally Oysterbourne ; or, as we would name it, Oysterbay. 
The Queen bought the old place in 1840, with five thousand acres of 
ground, and erected a splendid mansion in the Italian style, with a 
tower above it ninety feet high. 

The grounds slope to the salt-water side, where ride at anchor the 
fleet and elegant steam } r acht of the Queen, which latter cost three 
hundred thousand dollars. In this yacht she can circumnavigate her 
kingdom or visit the neighboring coast of France. 
J The Queen of England is the ideal and ornamental head of the 
British Empire. The President of the United States is a hard-work- 
ing man of many cares, who is held to a strict responsibility for his 
public behavior. Not so with the Queen. A cabinet of politicians 
administer her realm. Her will has long since ceased to be regarded 
in affairs of state, for, as it is a maxim that the sovereign can do no 



4:0 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

wrong, her ministers take care to rule the state according to their own 
counsel, for they are ostensibly responsible to Parliament, and might 
possibly be made to suffer for her obstinacy or error. Since the ex- 
pulsion of James II., and notably since the American Revolution, the 
House of Commons has absorbed all political power in England. It 
is as if the House of Representatives at Washington said to the Pres- 
ident, " We will relieve you of the cares of state, but your office and 
person shall retain all their ancient title and respect ; you shall never 
be punished, but your prime minister who reigns in your name must be 
changed as often as we disagree with him." Thus, while the Queen is 
apparently the most powerful ruler on the earth, she is no more than 
an effigy, laden with jewels, covered with honors, surrounded by a 
court, and protected by a troop. The present Queen has made but 
one effort in the course of her long reign to have her way in any politi- 
cal question whatever, and that singularly was to keep her own maids 
of honor around her whom a new cabinet wished to displace. She 
was obliged to give way. 

Queen Victoria is an hereditary sovereign, descended from James 
I., son of Mary, Queen of Scots. Her reign, which in glory and dura- 
tion rivals that of Queen Elizabeth, seems to be a recompense for 
the sorrows of her beautiful ancestor. The great-grandson of James 
I. was George L, Elector of Hanover. George III., the King whom 
our revolutionaiy forefathers denounced, was Victoria's grandfather. 
Her father, the Duke of Kent, was one of George III.'s fifteen chil- 
dren, far down in the list, and it seemed improbable that he or his 
child would ever reach the throne. He was quite poor, badly treated, 
and, while abroad in Germany, whither he had gone to find cheap 
living, he married a widow, who was daughter to the Duke of Saxe- 
Coburg. The deaths of several intermediate heirs to the crown mak- 
ing it possible that he still might succeed to it, the Duke of Kent 
hastened to embark for England in 1819 ; but he had not money 
enough for the journe}^ home. His family refused to send it to him and 
he had to borrow it from some humble people. Soon after he reached 
the dull old Palace of Kensington, Victoria, his only child, was born 
on the 24th of May, and they called her the Mayflower. She was 
christened Alexandrina Victoria. Eight great noblemen and ecclesi- 
astics were present at her birth, amongst whom was the Duke of Wel- 
lington, who had fought the battle of Waterloo four years before. One 
month afterward the child was privately christened from a gold font 
by the Archbishop of Canterbury. In little more than six months her 



THE QUEEN AND THE PRESIDENT. 41 

father died, deeply in debt. Victoria's early youth was passed in 
dependence. Her mother knew what it was to be " dunned " by 
creditors as well as the father of Abraham Lincoln, yet her income 
was never less than the salary of the President, even when poorest. 

By passages from the life of Queen Victoria we can best illustrate 
what it is to be a " constitutional " Queen in our century. The public 
incidents of her life are mainly these : Her proclamation, her corona- 
tion, her marriage, and the birth of her heir, the Prince of Wales, 

The proclamation of the Queen ma}^ be compared to the announce- 
ment of the President-elect by the two houses of Congress on counting 
the electoral vote. The office of President never expires ; " the King 
never dies." On the same day that King William IV., her uncle, 
died, the head of the church, the head of the cabinet, and the Lord 
Mayor of London proceeded to old Kensington Palace, and the Prime 
Minister gave up to this young girl, just turned her eighteenth birth- 
day, the seals of office. All the cabinet signed the oath of allegiance 
to her. She made a little speech to them, written for her by the Prime 
Minister. Then she returned to them the seals of office. The official 
stamps were ordered to be re-engraved in her name, and the prayers 
of the Church of England altered in like manner. That same after- 
noon, while the dead King was lying on his bier, hundreds of carriages 
came to Kensington Palace bringing visitors to offer homage and con- 
gratulation. That night the Prime Minister wrote a proclamation, 
which was next day sealed with the new great seal, and, being read 
aloud at Kensington Palace, was circulated around the world. At 
the reading of this proclamation, which occurred at ten o'clock in the 
morning, Kensington Palace was the scene of the following ceremo- 
nies, as described by McGilchrist, # the biographer : — 

u All the avenues to the old palace were crowded, every balcony, 
window, and housetop being crammed with the better class of specta- 
tors. The space in the quadrangle in front of the window where Her 
Majest} 7 was to appear was crowded with ladies and gentlemen, and 
even the parapets above were filled with people. 

u At ten o'clock the guns in the park fired a salute, and immedi- 
ately afterward the Queen made her appearance at the window of the 
tapestried anteroom adjoining the audience chamber, and was re- 
ceived with deafening cheers, — cheers all the more hearty that her 
appearance was a surprise, for few had known that she was to be there 
present. She was dressed in deep mourning, with a white tippet, 
white cuffs, and a border of white lace under a small black bonnet, 
6 



42 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

which was placed far back on her head, exhibiting her light-brown 
hair simply parted in front. She viewed the proceedings with intense 
interest, standing during the whole rehearsal of the proclamation ; 
and, although she looked pale and fatigued, she returned the repeated 
rounds of cheers with great grace and dignity. All were touched 
with the pale face, wet with tears, calm and simply grave, the gravity 
being enhanced by the plain black dress and bands of brown hair, 
giving an aspect of Quaker-like neatness. On either side stood Lords 
Melbourne and Lansdowne, in their state dresses and blue ribbons, 
and close to her was her mother, who was dressed similarly to the 
Queen. 

44 In the court-yard were Garter King-at-Arms, with Heralds and 
Pursuivants in their robes of office, and eight Officers-of-Arms on horse- 
back, bearing massive silver maces ; Sergeants-at-Arms, with their 
maces and collars ; the Sergeant Trumpeter, with his mace and collar ; 
the trumpets, Drum-Major and drums, and Knights Marshal and men. 
On Her Majesty showing herself at the presence-chamber window, 
Garter principal King-^at-Arms, having taken his station in the court- 
yard under the window, accompanied by the Duke of Norfolk as Earl- 
Marshal of England, read the proclamation, containing the formal 
and official announcement of the demise of King William IV., and of 
the consequent accession of Queen Alexandrina Victoria to the rule 
of these realms. The proclamation was brief, and to the point : — 






" ' Whereas it hath pleased Almighty God to call to his mercy our late Sov- 
ereign Lord, King William IV., of blessed memory, by whose decease the im- 
perial crown of the united kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland is solely and 
rightfully come to the High and Mighty Princess Alexandrina Victoria, we 
therefore, the lords spiritual and temporal of this realm, being here assisted 
with these of his late Majesty's Privy Gouncil, with numbers of other princi- 
pal gentlemen of quality, the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and citizens of London, do 
now hereby with one voice and consent of tongue, proclaim that the High and 
Mighty Princess Alexandrina Victoria is now, by the death of our late Sover- 
eign William IV., of happy memoiy, become our only lawful and rightful liege 
lady, Alexandrina Victoria I.. Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, Defender 
of the Faith, — to whom w r e acknowledge all faith and constant obedience, 
with all humble and hearty affection, beseeching God, by whom kings and 
queens do reign, to bless the Eoyal Princess Alexandrina Victoria with long 
and happy years to reign. God save the Queen ! ' 

44 At the termination of this proclamation the band struck up the 
national anthem, and a signal was given for the Park and Tower guns 









THE QUEEN AND THE PRESIDENT. 43 

to fire, in order to announce the fact of the proclamation being made. 
The air was rent with cheers by those within the area, which were 
taken up by the tens of thousands outside. The moment she was 
proclaimed Queen, she turned round, threw her arms about her moth- 
er's neck, and wept without restraint. When her uncle, the Duke of 
Sussex, presented himself, to take the oath of allegiance, and was 
about to kneel in her presence to kiss her hand, she gracefully pre- 
vented him, kissed his cheek affectionately, and said, l Do not kneel, 
my. uncle, for I am still Victoria, your niece.' " 

Three weeks afterward the young Queen moved to Buckingham 
Palace, and held her first court levee. This leads us to describe a 
royal reception. 

The Queen's receptions are divided into levees and drawing-rooms, 
which are quite different affairs, although we generally confound the 
terms in America. 

A levee is an occasion for the presentation of gentlemen, only, to 
the Queen. 

A " drawing-room " is an occasion for the presentation of ladies, 
chiefly, to the Queen. 

Each of these opportunities is advertised in the London daily pa- 
pers with directions as to the coming and going of carriages. Unlike 
the receptions of our chief magistrate, the utmost care and circum- 
spection are exercised in admitting persons to these levees and draw- 
ing-rooms. Court dress must be worn. The name of the person 
wishing to be introduced, with the name of the nobleman, gentleman, 
or foreign minister wishing to introduce him, must be sent to the 
Lord Chamberlain several days before presentation, and "the latter is 
supposed to send the cards to the Queen that she may personally pass 
upon them. 

The Queen and her household, indeed, would be less ceremonious 
and censorious about the quality of visitors to St. James's Palace, if 
it were not for the ludicrous and reverend jealousy of the common 
people and the newspapers. In 1862, a man who had been convicted 
of swindling was accidentally introduced to the Queen, and the press 
of the entire country was filled with indignant complaints about it. 
All this seems queer to us, used to the hurly-burly of a night at the 
White House ; but perhaps it might be well if we also took the honor 
of the President more out of the custody of politicians. 

Any English person who has been introduced to the Queen can make 
his ambassador in any land introduce him to the sovereign thereof 






44 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

The ceremony of presenting addresses to the Queen, greatl}' stickled 
for by Englishmen, is also regulated after the severest fashion. Xot 
more than four persons can present an address, although it may be 
signed by a million, and the bearers are permitted to offer no com- 
ments or speeches whatever. The latter provision, if insisted upon 
at Washington, would probably put an end to all petitioning. 

On her first reception the Queen wore a rich lama dress, her head 
glittered with diamonds, and her breast was covered with the insignia 
of the Garter and other orders. A pair of embroidered velvet slip- 
pers covered feet, which, resting on a cushion, were observed and ad- 
mired by all as * ; exquisitely small." 

The first official ceremony of the new girl Queen was the dissolu- 
tion of Parliament ; for the Queen is a part of Parliament, and her 
attendance upon the opening, the proroguing, or the dissolving there- 
of, is made an occasion of considerable pomp. 

It is with this imposing procession that the Queen opens, prorogues, 
or dissolves Parliament : — 

Six grand carriages, each drawn by a set of bays, precede her im- 
mediate party. These carriages are driven by servants in powdered 
wigs, knee-breeches of silk or velvet, silk stockings, and buckled 
shoes, and footmen in like gorgeous livery stand behind them. 

The first carriage contains three Gentlemen Ushers, and the Exon 
in Waiting. The second carriage contains a Groom in Waiting, and 
three Pages of Honor in Waiting. The third carriage contains the 
Equerry in Waiting, and the Groom of the Robes. The fourth car- 
riage contains the Clerk, Marshal, the Silver Stick in Waiting, the 
Field Officer in Waiting, and the Comptroller of the Household. The 
fifth carriage contains the Captain of the Yeomen of the Guard, the 
Lord in Waiting, and the Treasurer of the Household. 

The sixth carriage contains the Lady in Waiting, the Lord Stew- 
ard, and the Gold Stick in Waiting. All these officials are clad in 
georgeous state-dress. These six carriages are followed by the 
Queen's marshalmen, the Queen's footmen of state, and a party of 
the yeomen guard. After all this follows the grand state coach, 
which cost nearly forty thousand dollars, was constructed in 1762, or 
fourteen years prior to the independence of America, by the design 
of Sir Wm. Chambers, a celebrated architect, and was painted by 
Cipriani. In this coach sits the Queen. Her crown has gone before 
her, carried by one of the Lord Chamberlain's chief officers upon a 
Telvet cushion. The Lord Chamberlain and the Vice Chamberlain 



THE QUEEN AND THE PRESIDENT. 45 

conduct her to this carriage. None ride with her except the Mistress 
of the Robes and the Master of the Horse. Eight magnificent cream- 
colored horses draw this gorgeous coach. 

The ceremony which the Queen performed within the Houses of 
Parliament will come more properly in the chapter upon the " House 
of Lords." 

About four months afterward she visited in grand state the ancient 
Corporation of London, or that part of London which exclusively has 
a city charter and was anciently surrounded by walls. This also is a 
celebrated royal ceremony in England, and it illustrates how jealously 
London city insists upon all its hereditary honors and privileges. 
Her dress was pink satin shot with silver. She rode from Marl- 
borough House, her temporar}- residence, — now the property of her 
son, the Prince of Wales, — to the Guildhall, or City Hall of Lon- 
don. All along the way banners, evergreens, mottoes, and her por- 
traits blew in the dark fogs of the narrow streets. At Temple Bar, 
one of the ancient gates of London, she found the way barred before 
her. but there the Lord Mayor and aldermen dismounted from horse- 
back, and presented her with the keys of the gate. Then they were 
swung back and permitted her to enter, but before her coach the 
Lord Mayor rode all the length of the city, with the jealous sword 
thereof held aloft, while behind her followed the mounted aldermen. 
Around St. Paul's cathedral the guilds, or voting companies of trades- 
men, were crowded upon their "hustings" or voting-places, to in- 
timate that they had a voice by right in her government. An address 
of welcome and fealty was presented to her, and the boys of the 
charity schools sang the national anthem of u God save the Queen." 
At Guildhall she was regaled with a magnificent banquet, at the 
expense of the city of London, ajid she returned to Westminster over 
the same route, — illuminated in the night. 

The first message which the Queen sent to Parliament was to ask 
for a moneyed income for her German mother. This was promptly 
granted, and one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year was the 
sum fixed, equal to six years' salary of the President of the United 
States. After this the Queen observed the strictest formal etiquette 
toward her mother, to quiet any suspicions that the old foreign lady 
was influencing her in the state. Her mother was always placed at 
1 her left hand at dinner, which is in the palace quite a ceremon}' of it- 
self. The old lady, relieved of " duns " and well-provided for, lived 
down to 1861, the same year the Queen's husband died. 



46 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

About a year after her proclamation, the young Queen, now past 
nineteen years of age, was solemnly crowned at Westminster Abbey. 
We are all familiar with the ceremony of inaugurating the President 
of the United States. It costs the government nothing. It consists 
of a speech to the people and the taking of an oath at the hands of 
the highest judge in the land. Some of our presidents have ridden 
to the Capitol alone on horseback, " hitched " their own horses to the 
fence, taken the oath, untied the horse again, and ridden back to the 
White House. Whatever festivities we have, incidentally, are of the 
spontaneous movement of the people. Washington was inaugurated 
at the New York City Hall. Jefferson was the first President in- 
augurated at Washington. Madison was the first at Washington who 
addressed the crowd. There have been two days when the country 
was without a President, the fourth of March falling upon Sunday. 
After these simple reminiscences we may better conceive the extraor- 
dinary pageant of crowning an English sovereign, when we are 
told that Victoria's coronation cost three hundred and fifty thousand 
dollars, which was not much beyond a quarter of the expenses at the 
coronation of the worthless George IV. 

This ceremony of coronation is the most gorgeous pageant wit- 
nessed in the British Empire, where the well-known loyalty of the 
people makes it a popular holiday as well as a right ancient 
ceremony. It happens hot more than once or twice in the lifetime 
of a reader, although there was one Englishman, u Old Parr," who 
had lived in the reigns of ten sovereigns, namely : Edward IV., 
Edward V., Richard III., Henry VII., Henry VIII., Edward VI., 
Mary, Elizabeth, James I., and Charles I. ; in all one hundred and 
fift}-two years ; he was the Methusaleh of modern times. 

To see Victoria's coronation in June, 1838, four hundred thousand 
people visited London. One million dollars in gold were paid, in 
the aggregate, merely for window-room to look out upon the proces- 
sion. One ambassador paid eight thousand dollars for a chariot in 
which to ride in the pageant, and another hired one for a few hours 
for twelve hundred and fifty dollars. Marshal Soult and the Duke 
of Wellington, ancient opponents, were amongst the thousands who 
honored the Queen. The procession passed over a route not above 
two miles long, starting from Buckingham Palace and describing a 
semicircle through Westminster to the grand old Abbey, but not 
entering the city of London proper, at all. In the procession 
inarched # or rode all the executive parts of the government, the 



THE QUEEN AND THE PRESIDENT. 4J 

Queen's household, her troops, and the foreign ambassadors, while 
the nobility and the lords and dignities of the church waited in full 
dress in the Abbey' from daylight till nearly noon. 

Contemporary accounts of the spectacle of this procession and of 
the scene within the Abbey when the Queen arrived there, excite the 
imagination to the utmosto The day was beautiful for London. At 
dawn the guns of the grim and bloody old Tower, several miles from 
the Palace, expressed themselves in salvos. London was full of 
ringing bells and heraldic banners, of cannon and cheering, of drink 
and pleasantry. The procession moved soon after breakfast-time, 
and very wonderful it was as a testimonial to the power of the Brit- 
ish Empire. The most novel feature of the procession, says one 
writer, was the carriages of the foreign ambassadors, with their 
jagers in gorgeous or grotesque uniforms. These came in the order 
in which they had arrived on their special missions to the coronation ; 
the carriages of the regular resident ambassadors came in their ap- 
pointed order of precedence. Next followed the members of the 
Royal Family, the Duchess of Kent, the Queen's mother preceding 
the carriages of the surviving sons of George III. To the Queen's 
barge-master, with forty-eight watermen, succeeded twelve of the 
royal carriages, containing the ladies and gentlemen of the house- 
hold. Next came mounted, three and three, the high functionaries 
of the army, amongst them the great Duke of Waterloo. And after 
came royal huntsmen, yeomen, prickers, marshalmen, foresters, and 
a host of other minor functionaries, — the whole of the mounted 
household troops being here and there interspersed at intervals in the 
cavalcade with the gigantic Horse Guards, helmeted and most con- 
spicuous. Then came the grand state coach containing the Queen, 
with the Duchess of Sutherland, Mistress of the Robes. On either 
side of the carriage rode Lord Combermere, Gold Stick in Waiting, 
and the Earl of Ilchester, Captain of the Yeomen of the Guard. 
.The Earl of Albermarle, as Master of the Horse, and the Duke of 
Buccleuch, as Captain-General of the Royal Scottish Archers, rode 
behind. A squadron of Life Guards brought up the rear. 

At Westminster Abbey this splendid procession came to a halt. 
Above its music, plumes, and emblazoned banners, with the gorgeous 
royal standard, blue, yellow, and crimson, advanced above all the rest, 
rose the solemn twin towers of the great cathedral, two hundred and 
twentj^-five feet, grimy and venerable, and buttresses and flying but- 
tresses, carvings of saints and kings, pinnacles and transepts, showed 



48 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

hoary as sooty frostwork in the bright sunshine. The doors swung 
wide open, and nobles of state and bishops appeared to receive her. 
Music burst suddenly through the solemn vastness of the abbey- 
church as the sovereign entered, making the deep arches and vaulted 
roof tremble, and all the painted windows within shed their soft colors 
upon the tombs and effigies of kings, as well as upon the brilliant 
congregation, filling far-off galleries and swarming over the floors of 
stone. Down the long length of the nave and choir, four hundred and 
sixteen feet ; up into the carved groinings, one hundred feet, held to 
their places by entwined trunks of stone ; into the grand transepts, 
two hundred and twenty-five feet from rose-window to window, the 
coronation anthem poured. As the Queen retired to her robirig-room 
the procession formed in the nave and slowly marched toward the 
altar, which was laden with magnificent gold plate, and beside which 
stood St. Edward's chair. Besides the elements which are common 
to all great English royal processions, and which it is, therefore, not 
requisite to recapitulate, the regalia, which only appear on such oc- 
casions, were thus distributed : St. Edward's staff, the golden spurs* 
the sceptre with the cross, the curtana, and two swords of investi- 
ture, were borne respectively by the Duke of Roxburgh, Lord Byron, 
Duke of Cleveland, Duke of Devonshire, Marquis of Westminster, 
and Duke of Sutherland. The coronets of the princes of the blood 
were borne by noblemen ; their trains by knights' or peers' sons. 
Next came the Earl-Marshal, Duke of Norfolk, with his staff, Lord 
Melbourne with the sword of state, and the Duke of Wellington with 
his staff as Lord High Constable ; the Dukes of Richmond, Hamil- 
ton, and Somerset bore the sceptre and dove, St. Edward's crown, and 
the orb ; the Bishops of Bangor, Winchester, and London carried the 
patina, chalice, and Bible. 

The Queen, who was supported on one side by the Bishop of Bath 
and Wells, on the other by the Bishop of Durham, w r ore a ro}^al robe 
of crimson velvet, furred with ermine, and broidered with gold lace. 
She wore the collars of her orders, and on her head a circlet of gold. 
Eight peers' daughters bore her train, most of them friends of her 
childhood, and distinguished by their personal attractions. About; 
fifty ladies of rank, occupying various positions in the household, 
succeeded, and the procession was concluded by officers of state and 
yeomen of the guard. 

The splendid •attire of some of the foreign ambassadors attracted 
more attention than even the sovereign to whose court they were accred- 






THE QUEEN AND THE PRESIDENT. 49 

ited. The costume of the Austrian Prince Esterhazy, says one author- 
ity, was by far the most gorgeous ; his dress, even to his boot-heels, 
sparkled with diamonds. The Turkish Ambassador seemed especially 
bewildered at the general splendor of the scene ; for some moments he 
stopped in astonishment, and had to be admonished to move to his 
allotted place, 

As the Queen advanced slowly to the centre of the choir, she was 
received with hearty plaudits, and the musicians sang the anthem, " I 
was Glad." At its close, the boys of Westminster School, privileged 
of old to occupy a special gallery, chanted " Vivat Victoria Regina." 

On this the Queen moved to a chair, midway between the chair of 
homage and the altar, and there, after a few moments' private devo- 
tion, kneeling on a fald-stool, she sat down, and the ceremony proper 
began. 

First came the " recognition." The Archbishop of Canterbury, 
accompanied by some half-dozen of the greatest civil dignitaries, ad- 
vanced, and said, " Sirs, I here present unto you Queen Victoria, the 
undoubted Queen of this realm ; wherefore, all of you who have come 
this day to do your homage, are you willing to do the same ? " On 
this, all Her Majesty's subjects present shouted, " God save Queen 
Victoria ! " the Archbishop turning in succession to the north, south, 
and west sides of the Abbey, and the Queen doing the same. The 
bishops who bore them then placed the patina, chalice, and Bible on 
the altar ; the Queen, kneeling, made her first offering, — a pall, or al- 
tar-cloth, of gold. The Archbishop having offered a prayer, the rega- 
lia were laid on the altar ; the litany and communion services were 
read, and a brief sermon preached, by various prelates. 

The preacher was the Bishop of London, and his text was from the 
second book of Chronicles, chapter xxxiv., verse 31 : "And the king 
stood in his place, and made a covenant before the Lord, to walk after 
the Lord, and to keep his commandments, and his testimonies, and 
his statutes, with all his heart, and with all his soul, to perform the 
words of the covenant which are written in this book." After the ser- 
mon the Queen swore, the Archbishop of Canterbury putting the oath 
as follows : — 

"Archbishop of Canterbury. — Will you solemnly promise and swear 
to govern the people of this United Kingdom of Great Britain and 
Ireland, and the dominions thereto belonging, according to the stat- 
utes in Parliament agreed on, and the respective laws and customs of 
the same ? 

7 



50 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

" Queen. — I solemnly promise so to do. 

"Archbishop. — Will you, to the utmost of your power, cause law 
and justice, in mercy, to be executed in all your judgments ? 

" Queen. — I will. 

"Archbishop. — Will you, to the utmost of your power, maintain the 
laws of God, the true profession of the -gospel, and the Protestant 
reformed religion, established bylaw? And will you maintain and 
preserve inviolably the settlement of the United Church of England 
and Ireland, and the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government 
thereof, as by law established within England and Ireland and the 
territories thereto belonging ? And will you preserve to the bishops 
and clergy of England and Ireland, and to the churches there com- 
mitted to their charge, all such rights and privileges as do, or shall, 
appertain unto them, or any of them? 

" Queen. — All this I promise to do." 

The Queen then went to the altar and laid her hand upon the gos- 
pels, taking the following oath : " The things which I have heretofore 
( promised I will perform and keep. So help me God." 

The Queen then kissed the gospels at the altar and signed the oath. 
The choir meantime sang, " Veni, Creator, Dominus." The Church of 
Scotland is protected by a separate oath, taken at a different time. 

Next in the order of coronation was the anointment. The Queen 
sitting in King Edward's chair, four knights of the garter holding the 
while over her head a canopy of cloth of gold, her head and hands 
were anointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury ; after which he said 
his prayer, or blessing, over her. In quick succession followed the 
delivery of the spurs, sword of state, etc. The Dean of Westminster, 
having taken the crown from the altar, handed it to the Archbishop, 
who reverently placed it on the Queen's head. This was no sooner 
done than there arose from eveiy part of the edifice a tremendous 
shout, " God save the Queen ! " accompanied with cheers and the 
waving of hats and handkerchiefs. At the same moment the peers 
and peeresses put on their coronets, the bishops their caps, and the 
kings-of-arms their crowns, the trumpets sounded, the drums were 
beaten, and volleys fired from the tower and park guns. 

The crown — that symbol and metaphor of all sovereignt} r , spiritual 
as well as temporal — was especially made for Queen Victoria's coro- 
nation, and is quite a different affair from the crown we generally con- 
ceive. It weighs one pound and three-quarters, or little more than a 
man's winter hat, and is a cap of purple velvet, enclosed by hoops of 



THE QUEEN AND THE PRESIDENT. 51 

silver, and studded with many diamonds and precious stones, amongst 
which are a splendid ruby and a matchless sapphire. Many of these 
stones had entered into the composition of other crowns, worn as long 
ago as the discovery of America. The whole of this comfortable crown 
is estimated to be worth £111,900 sterling, or about $559,500, which 
is, after all, only about three months' income of Mr. Alexander T. 
Stewart, the New York merchant, or less than the frequent turn of 
an " operation" in Wall Street, 

•The royal crown proper of England, however, is a circle of gold 
enriched with stones and pearls, and heightened with four crosses 
pattee and four fleurs-de-lis alternately. From these rise four arch- 
diadems, adorned with pearls, which close under a mound, ensigned 
with a cross pattee. It weighs eight pounds. With this heavy orna- 
ment was crowned George III., the last King of the thirteen American 
colonies. After the benediction and Te Deum, the Queen was " en- 
throned," or " lifted" as the formulary has it, from the chair in w T hich 
she had first sat into the chair of homage, where she delivered the 
sceptre, etc., to noblemen, while she received the fealty of her more 
distinguished subjects. The Archbishop first knelt and did homage 
for himself and all the spiritual peers ; next came the princes of the 
blood, who merely touched the crown, kissed her left cheek, swore 
the oath of homage, and retired without kneeling ; then the peers in 
succession came, — seventeen dukes, twentj'-two marquises, ninety- 
four earls, twenty viscounts, and ninety-two barons. Each peer 
knelt bareheaded, and kissed Her Majesty's hand. Lord Rolle, who 
was upwards of eighty, stumbled and fell in going up the steps ; the 
Queen at once stepped forward, and held out her hand to assist him. 
While the peers were doing homage, the Earl of Surrey, Treasurer of 
the Household, threw silver coronation medals about the choir and 
lower galleries ; and when the homage was completed, the members 
of the House of Commons, who occupied a special gallery, indicated 
their loyalty by giving nine lusty cheers. It was almost a quarter 
to four when the procession came back along the nave. 

The return cavalcade along the streets was even more attractive 
than that of the morning, for the royal and noble personages now 
wore their coronets, and the Queen her crown. 

In the evening, the Queen entertained a hundred guests to dinner 
at Buckingham Palace, and at a late hour witnessed from the roof 
fireworks in the park. 

The Duke of Wellington gave a ball, to which two thousand guests 






52 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 



were invited. All the cabinet ministers gave state dinners ; a fair 
was held in Hyde Park ; and a grand review of troops by the Queen, 
and a great banquet was given at Guildhall. 

About seven months after her coronation the Queen was married to 
Albert, her cousin,' the second son of the Duke of the little state of 
Saxe Coburg in Germany. His father and mother had been divorced 
while he was a child. The match had been really made by Victoria's 
mother and his relatives, particularly by the old King of Belgium, 
Leopold, father of " Carlotta," the brief Empress of Mexico. He had 
met the future Queen when he was seventeen years old. His income 
at home in Germany was twelve thousand dollars a year, and he re- 
ceived his education at Bonn on the Rhine. He was younger than 
the Queen by a few months. Before he came to England the Queen 
sent him the order of the Garter, the highest insignia of English 
knighthood, and a present of diamonds, both the honor and the pres- 
ent being of value to his poor estate. There was considerable oppo- 
sition to the match, and the Queen was in no hurry to marry anybody, 
but she committed some indiscretions while a virgin Queen, and her 
ministers were anxious" to put her under the control of a husband. 
No member of the ro}^al family in England is allowed to marry an 
English subject, and the choice on the Continent is limited to Prot- 
estant princes. There are few Protestant princes equal in rank or 
wealth to those of England, and therefore the hand of the powerful 
Queen was in great request. 

This restrictive law, justly denounced by many English people, 
compels the princes of England, if they dare marry at home, to 
beget illegitimate children only, and the same has been the case in 
Victoria's time, — virtuous women and wives ranking before the law 
as mere mistresses. The object of the law is to prevent ambitious 
suitors making civil feuds in the nobility at home. 

Young Albert came courting to England by the advice of old Leo- 
pold in 1839, four months before his marriage. The young Queen 
received him at Windsor, was charmed with his manners and appear- 
ance, and in a week decided to accept him. 

A magazine article published not long ago in England gives the 
following undisputed account of his wooing : — 

" The Prince played the part of a royal lover with all the grace 
peculiar to his house. He never willingly absented himself from the 
Queen's society and presence, and her every wish was anticipated 
with the alacrity of an unfeigned attachment. At length Her Majesty, 



THE QUEEN AND THE PRESIDENT. 53 

having wholly made up her mind as to the issue of this visit, found 
herself in some measure embarrassed as to the fit and proper means 
of indicating her preference to the Prince. This was a perplexing 
task, but the Queen acquitted herself of it with equal delicacy and 
tact. At one of the palace balls she took occasion to present her 
bouquet to the Prince at the conclusion of a dance, and the hint was 
not lost upon the polite and gallant German. His close uniform, 
buttoned up to the throat, did not admit of his placing the Persian- 
like gift where it would be most honored ; so he immediately drew 
his penknife, and cut a slit in his dress in the neighborhood of his 
heart, where he gracefully deposited the happy omen. Again, to 
announce to the privy council her intended union was an easy duty 
in comparison to that of intimating her wishes to the principal party 
concerned ; and here, too, it is said that our Sovereign Lady dis- 
played unusual presence of mind and female ingenuity. 

" The Prince was expressing the grateful sense which he entertained 
of his reception in England, and the delight which he experienced 
during his stay from the kind attentions of royalty, when the Queen 
very naturally and very pointedly, put to him the question upon 
which their future fates depended : ' If, indeed, your Highness is so 
much pleased with this country, perhaps you would not object to re- 
maining in it, and making it your home.' No one can doubt the re- 
ply." 

Prince Albert's testimony tallies with the above ; for we have ex- 
tant a copy of a letter he wrote to his grandmother immediatei}' after 
his betrothal. 

Prince Albert wrote to his grandmother : — 

" The subject," he says, " which has occupied us so much of late 
is at last settled. The Queen sent for me alone to her room a few 
days ago, and declared to me in a genuine outburst of love and af- 
fection that I had gained her whole heart, and would make her in- 
tensely happy if I would make her the sacrifice of sharing her life 
w r ith her ; for she said she looked on it as a sacrifice. Since that 
moment Victoria does whatever she fancies I should wish or like, and 
w r e talk together a great deal about our future life, which she promises 
me to make as happy as possible. Oh, the future ! " 

The entire courtship of the Prince and Queen lasted five weeks. 
The engagement was first communicated to the ministers, then to 
relatives, at last to Parliament. The latter prince-ridden body was 
asked to vote Prince Albert two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a 



54: THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

year. After some severe debate, which made angry both the Queen 
and old Leopold, this sum was reduced to one hundred and fifty 
thousand, — enough, one would think. To avoid further debate, 
Prince Albert refused to be made an English peer. A vessel was 
sent to Calais to bring the Prince to England ; his bride and her moth- 
er received him at the door of Buckingham Palace, and that night he 
paid formal visits to all the members of the royal family. The next 
day but one they were married. A description of the marriage cer- 
emony will be interesting to the ladies, besides necessary to make 
plain the real life of a living sovereign. 

Prince Albert set out from Buckingham Palace, we are told, dressed 
as a British field-marshal, and with all the insignia of the Garter, 
the jewels of which had been a personal present from the Queen, 
having on one side his father and on the other his brother, both in 
military uniforms. Lie entered his carriage amid tremendous cheers, 
and the enthusiastic waving of handkerchiefs by a bevy of ladies 
privileged to stand in the ground lobbies of the palace, and was es- 
corted to the chapel of St. James's Palace by a squadron of the Life 
Guards. On the return of the carriages which carried the Prince and 
his compan}% Her Majesty was in turn apprised that all was in read- 
iness for her departure. She, too, was enthusiastically received, 
<c but her eye was bent principally upon the ground." In the same 
carriage with the Queen rode the Duchesses of Kent and Sutherland. 
It was noticed as she drove along that she was extremely pale, and 
looked very anxious, though two or three incidents in the crowd 
caused her to smile. 

On her arrival at her old brick palace of St. James, the Queen 
was conducted to the presence chamber, where she remained with her 
maids-of-honor and train-bearers, awaiting the Lord Chamberlain's 
summons to the altar. Meanwhile, the colonnade within the palace, 
along which the bridal procession had to pass and repass, had been 
filled since early morn by the elite of England's rank and beauty. 
Each side of the wa} T was a parterre of white robes, white relieved 
with blue, white and green, amber, crimson, purple, fawn, and stone 
color. All wore wedding favors of lace, orange-flower blossoms, or 
silver bullion, some of great size, and many in most exquisite taste. 
Most of the gentlemen were in court dress ; and the scene during 
the patient hours of waiting was made picturesque by the passing to 
and fro in various garbs of burly yeomen of the guard, armed with 
their massive halberts, slight-built gentlemen-at-arms, with partisans 



THE QUEEN AND THE PRESIDENT. 55 

of equal slightness ; elderly pages of state, and pretty pages of hon- 
or ; officers of the lord chamberlain, and officers of the woods and 
forests ; heralds, all embroidery, and cuirassiers in polished steel ; 
prelates in their rochets, and priests in their stoles, and singing-boys 
in their surplices of virgin white. 

Within the chapel, in which the altar was magnificently decorated 
and laden with a profusion of gold plate, four state chairs were set, 
varying in splendor according to the rank of the destined occupants, 
respectively for Her Majesty, Prince Albert, the Queen Dowager, and 
the Duchess of Kent. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York, 
and the Bishop of London, having taken their places within the altar- 
rails, a flourish of trumpets announced the procession of the bride- 
groom. As the Prince passed along, the gentlemen greeted him with 
loud clapping of the hands, and the ladies waved their handkerchiefs 
with at least equal enthusiasm. In a few minutes the procession 
of the bride was announced by trumpets and drums. It was of six 
or seven times the numerical strength of the bridegroom's, and the 
beauty of the twelve bridesmaids, all daughters of peers of the three 
highest grades, was specially commended. The Duchess of Cam- 
bridge led by the hand her. then child-daughter, the Princess Mary, 
" and the mother of so beautiful a child was certainly not to be seen 
without much interest." The* Duchess of Kent appeared "disconso- 
late and distressed ; " while the Duke of Sussex, who was to give 
away the bride, was " in excellent spirits." The Queen herself looked 
" anxious and excited, and paler even than usual." She was dressed 
in. a rich white satin, trimmed with orange-flower blossoms. She 
wore a w T reath of the same, over which was a veil of rich Honiton 
lace, worn so as not to conceal her face. She wore as jewels the col- 
lar of the order of the Garter, with a diamond necklace and ear-rings. 

After the conclusion of the marriage rite, the Queen hastily crossed 
to the opposite side of the altar, and kissed the queen dowager and 
her mother, who were standing there. She then took Prince Albert's 
hand, and passed down the aisle. On the return to Buckingham 
Palace, it was observed that the Prince, still retaining the Queen's 
hand in his own, whether by accident or design, held it in such a way 
as to display the wedding-ring, which was more solid than is usual in 
ordinal weddings. When the Queen had been led into the palace 
by her husband, it was observed that her morning paleness had 
entirely passed off, and that she entered her own halls with an open, 
joyous, and slightly flushed countenance. 



56 



THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 



After the wedding breakfast the young couple departed, at a quarter 
before four, for Windsor, amid the cheers of the undiminished multi- 
tude. Her Majesty's travelling-dress was a white satin pelisse, 
trimmed with swan's-down, with a white satin bonnet and feather. 

The marriage thus commemorated was one of the happiest royal 
attachments ever made. Doubtless the bride and groom already 
loved each other, or soon learned to do so. The poor Pririfce was 
obliging and modest ; he made a prudent counsellor to the Queen, and 
seldom excited public criticism. He had the German domestic vir- 
tues, — love of method, thrift, and the open air. His wife became busy 
with child-bearing, and therefore made no trouble nor interference 
with the state. He turned the energies of his household to saving 
money, making good investments, and marrying off his children as 
well as possible ; and unless his sons should turn out profligates, 
the private estate laid up by Victoria and Albert is enough to make 
them very rich and powerful, even if they should lose the English 
crown. 

After marriage, house-keeping, and of the Queen's practice of this 
first of female arts we have some close and entertaining glimpses in 
her own books, called " Early Years of the Prince Consort," and 
" Journal of our Life in the Highlands." But the testimony of third 
persons is pernaps more valid, and fro'm one of these, Lord Lennox, 
we obtain the following account of a state dinner in Buckingham 
Palace. Anybody who has dined in the White House at Washington 
can draw the comparison. 

" At each end of the dining-hall, buffets, seventeen feet high and 
forty broad, were set. They were of rich fretted Gothic framework, 
covered with crimson cloth, and brilliant with massive gold plate. 
Immediately opposite the queen was set a pyramid of plate, its apex 
being the tiger's head captured at Seringapatam, and comprising the 
1 Iluma ' of precious stones which Lord Wellesley, the Governor- 
General of India, presented to George IV. The table, which was 
laid for a hundred guests, extended the whole length of the hall. All 
down the centre, epergnes, vases, cups, and candelabra were ranged, 
the celebrated St. George's candelabrium being opposite Her Maj- 
esty. The hall was splendidly illuminated, and two bands of the 
guards discoursed sweet music from a balcony. The yeomen of the 
guard stood on duty at the entrance. The repast, which did ample 
justice to the merits of the Queen's renowned cuisinier, Francatelli, 
was entirely served in gold plate, and the attendance was so faultless 



THE QUEEN AND THE PRESIDENT. 57 

that there was less bustle and confusion than usually attend a repast 
shared by a party of ten or a dozen. At a quarter to nine grace was 
said ; and after the dessert and wine had been placed on the table, 
the Lord Steward rose and proposed, without remark, 'The Queen.' 
The Queen simply, when the toast had been drank, bowed her ac- 
knowledgments. After a brief pause, the health of Prince Albert 
was drank standing, as the Queen's had been, the band playing. the 
* Coburg March.' At half-past nine the Queen rose, and, accom- 
panied by the Duchess of Kent, was followed by all the ladies to the 
drawing-room." 

The Queen and her family, however, have never been recognized as 
possessing genius. The Hanoverian dulness marks their counte- 
nances, and no Prince of that line could ever have earned great 
credit in private life. 

Guizot, the French statesman, who was the Queen's guest at dinner 
in 1840, remarked on the want of animation and interest in the con- 
versation, whether at the dinner-table or in the drawing-room. Poli- 
tics of any kind, home or foreign, were, apparently to his surprise, 
strictly avoided. When the gentlemen joined the ladies, which, 
throughout the Queen's reign, has been at a very short interval after 
the departure of the latter from the dining-room, they all sat on 
chairs round a circular table set before the Queen, who occupied a 
sofa. Two or three of her ladies engaged themselves in fancy work ; 
Prince Albert challenged some one to a game of chess. Lady Pal- 
merston and M. Guizot, " with some effort," carried on a flagging 
dialogue. The conversation being thus flat, M. Guizot took to look- 
ing at the pictures on the walls, of which there were but three, hung 
over the different doors of the apartment. He was very much aston- 
ished at the extraordinary contrasts in the subjects of these pictures. 
They certainly were most incogruous. One was Fenelon, the second 
the Czar Peter, and the third Anne Hyde, the discarded wife of 
James II. He asked one of his fellow-guests whether the combina- 
tion was intentional or an accident ? But he could get no satisfaction 
on the subject. No one had remarked the combination, and no one 
could tell the reason for it. 

At the levee which he attended the day following, he was still 
more astonished and perplexed. "I regard," he says, " with ex- 
cited esteem the profound respect of that vast assembly, courtiers, 
citizens, lawyers, churchmen, officers, military and naval, passing 
before the Queen, the greater portion bending the knee to kiss her 
8 



58 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

hand, all perfectly solemn, sincere, and awkward. The sincerity and 
seriousness were both needed to prevent those antiquated habits, 
wigs, and gags, those costumes which no one in England now wears 
except on such occasions, from appearing somewhat ridiculous. But 
I am little sensible to the outward appearance of absurdity when the 
substance partakes not of that character." 

Promptly on marriage-time Victoria's first child was born, now 
wife to the heir of the crown of Prussia. Less than a year after- 
ward the heir to Victoria's crown, the present Prince of Wales was 
born, and a state bulletin thus announced the fact : — 

■ " Buckingham Palace, Nov. 9th. 

" This morning, at twelve minutes before eleven o'clock, the Queen was 
happily delivered of a Prince, His Ro}'al Highness Prince Albert, Her Koyal 
Highness the Duchess of Kent, several Lords of Her Majesty's Most Honorable 
Privy Council, and the Ladies of Her Majesty's Bedchamber, being present. 
This great and important news was immediately made known to the town by 
the firing of the Tower and Park guns; and the Privy Council being as- 
sembled as soon as possible thereupon, at the Council Chamber, Whitehall, 
it was ordered that a Form of Thanksgiving be prepared by his Grace the 
Archbishop of Canterbury, to be used in all churches and chapels throughout 
England and Wales, and the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed, on Sunday, the 
fourteenth of November, or the Sunday after the respective ministers shall 
receive the same. 

"Her Majesty and the infant Prince are, God be praised! both doing 
Well." 

The Prince of Wales was born in dark and ominous times, in the 
starving days of 1841 ; yet all due exhibitions of loyalty were made. 

Upon the announcement of the happy accouchement, the nobility 
and gentry crowded to the palace to tend their dutiful inquiries as 
to the sovereign's convalescence. Amongst other, came the Lord 
Mayor and civic dignitaries in great state. They felt peculiarly 
proud that the Prince should have been born on Lord Mayor's clay ; 
in fact, just at the very moment when the time-honored municipal 
procession was starting from the city for Westminster. In memory 
of the happy coincidence, the Lord Mayor of the year, Mr. Pine, 
was created Sir John Pirie, Baronet. On the 4th of December, when 
he was twenty-five days old, the queen created her son by letters 
patent, Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester: " And him, our 
.said and most dear son, the Prince of the United Kingdom of Great 
Britain and Ireland, as has been accustomed, we do ennoble and 
invest with the said Principality and Earldom, by girding him with a 



THE QUEEN AND THE PRESIDENT. 59 

sword, by putting a coronet on his bead, and a gold ring on bis 
finger, and also by delivering a gold rod into bis band, that be may 
preside there, and direct and defend those parts." B}' the fact of 
his birth as heir-apparent, the Prince indefeasibly inherited, without 
the necessity of patent or creation, these dignities, — the titles of 
Duke of Saxony, by right of his father ; and, by right of his mother, 
Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Rothsay, Earl of Carrick, Baron of Ren- 
frew, Lord of the Isles, and Great Steward of Scotland. 

It is this young man who is to succeed, in all probability, his vir- 
tuous and now widowed mother. 

Victoria, unlike many ladies in private life, never objected to in- 
creasing her family. She has borne nine children. She adorned the 
female character, and showed herself to be a healthy, spirited, yet 
modest lady, happy as she is good, until, in 1861, her sturdy German 
husband died. If the English throne is to continue, the offspring 
of Prince Albert will long occupy it, and to associate his death with 
their future careers these passages of bereavement in the palace are 
appended. 

Shortly after midnight the great bell of St. Paul's, which is never 
tolled except upon the death of a member of the royal family, 
boomed the fatal tidings over a district extending, in the quietude of 
the early Sabbath morn, for miles around the metropolis. 

The Queen, the Princess Alice, and the Prince of Wales, who had 
been hastily summoned from Cambridge, sat with the dying Prince 
until the last. After the closing scene the Queen supported herself 
nobl}', and, after a short burst of uncontrollable grief, she is said to 
have gathered her children around her, and addressed them in the 
most solemn and affectionate terms. " She declared to her family 
that, though she felt crushed by the loss of one who had been her 
companion through life, she knew how much was expected of her, 
and she accordingly called on her children to give her their assist- 
ance, in order that she might do her duty to them and the country '." 
The Duke of Cambridge, and many gentlemen connected with the 
court, with six of the royal children, were present at the Prince's 
death. In answer to some one of those present who tenderly offered 
condolence, the Queen is reported to have 'said : "I suppose I must 
not fret too much, for niany poor women have to go through the 
same trial. " 

Prince Albert was buried at Windsor and this is the inscription 



60 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

over his costly tomb, prepared, it is said, by the Queen's own hands ; 
the original is in Latin. 

" Here lies the most illustrious and exalted Albert, Prince Consort, Duke of 
Saxony, Prince of Saxe Coburg and Gotha, Knight of the Most Noble Order 
of the Garter, the most beloved husband of the most august and potent Queen 
Victoria. He died on the fourteenth day of December, 1861, in the forty- 
third year of his age." 

Hitherto I have given sketches of pageants only, such as connect the 
sovereign with the state. She is the nominal ruler over a " United 
Kingdom " of thirty millions of people, nineteen millions of whom in- 
habit England proper, and in her numerous colonies live about two 
hundred millions more, savage or civilized, four millions of whom are 
close beside the United States. Her parent kingdom, the island called 
" Great Britain," is the largest island in Europe, and the sixth in size 
in the world. At the time of the American Revolution the United 
Kingdom contained less than eight millions of people. At present 
the assessed wealth of that kingdom is thirty-two billions of dol- 
lars, — double the wealth of the United States ; its imports and ex- 
ports amount to seven hundred millions a year, and its debt is about 
four billions and one hundred millions. Each one of these vast items 
affords a volume of suggestion, which the present is not the place to 
consider. The aggregate of them unquestionably indicates the mighti- 
est empire of modern times, from which we, as a detached part, rank 
certainty not more than two places separated. This United King- 
dom owes the backbone of its power to the fusion of northern nations 
in it. By its insular position it was relieved from the ravages of 
other than civil war, and it bred hardy sailors on the long indented 
line of its coast. Its acceptance of the reformed or Protestant re- 
ligion made it a grand asylum for the free -spirited, ingenious, and 
persecuted Protestants of the Continent. It is the Roman Empire of 
Protestantism, and the Queen now at its head is a descendant of that 
Elector of Saxony who protected Martin Luther. When the Spanish 
Armada perished off the English coast, the sea changed masters. 
Coal, iron, tin, lead, and flax were the adventitious possessions of a 
race thus predestined. With scarcely an exception its kings have 
been unworthy of such a kingdom. Elizabeth and Oliver Cromwell 
stand almost isolated in its long list of wicked, errant, or sluggish 
sovereigns, and the state has made progress in almost every case, pro- 
portionate to its aggressions upon the monarch. With the present 



THE QUEEN AND THE PRESIDENT. 61 

expensive but otherwise harmless royal family, the United Kingdom 
has gained upon its past rapid and solid progress, and 'perhaps the 
poet, Tennyson, was even more excellent as a philosopher when he 
wrote of Victoria : — 

u Her court was pure ; her life serene ; 

God gave her peace; her land renosed; 
A thousand claims to reverence closed 
In her as mother, wife, and queen. 

" And statesmen at her council met, 

Who knew the seasons, — when to take 
Occasion by the hand, and make 
The bounds of freedom wider yet, 

" By shaping some august decree, 

"Which kept her throne unshaken still, 
Broad-based upon her people's will, 
And compassed by the inviolate sea." 



CHAPTER m. 

THE BRITISH ARISTOCRACY. 

Their number, origin, wealth, privileges, habits of life, estates, and influence on the 

nation. 

If, as some have contended, titles of honor afe founded in human 
happiness, gratitude, and love of distinction, happy should we be 
in America, who are all either "general," "colonel," "major," 
"squire," "chief," "boss," "captain," "cook," or "judge." One 
of our humorists has said, that in the height of the war he threw a 
stone at a dog, which, missing, hit six brigadier generals. " And," 
he naively concludes, " it was not a good day for brigadiers 
either." 

Soberly speaking, there are here no legalized titles but those of 
officers of the army and navy. Following colonial precedents, the 
President of the United States is sometimes called " His Excellency," 
but seldom by well-bred persons. " Honorable," used as a prefix 
to the names of members of Congress and others, is likewise an 
instance of deference or compliment, having no more authority than 
the " Esquire " which we now append by vicious habit to every male 
person's name, and which, like the word " Professor," used by 
mountebanks, charlatans, and school-teachers indiscriminately, has 
fallen into disfavor amongst people worthy of it. The universal 
habit here of addressing people by these fictitious titles is our defence 
against ever being compelled to accord them. When a sovereign in 
Europe wishes to bring a certain order of knighthood into disrepute, 
he confers it upon Tom, Dick, and Harry. So, to be addressed by 
the bare and respectful term of plain " Mister," is still the most 
honorable prefix known to Americans. 

But, if we look about us, we shall find abundant relics of an aris- 
tocracy, in the names of our streets, counties, and villages. New 
York has Kings, Queens, and Dutchess County ; Virginia has Prin- 
cess and Princesses. In some part of the United States the estate 
of every nobleman in England is probably commemorated. The 

62 



THE BRITISH ARISTOCRACY. 63 

counties of New York and Massachusetts abound in such revivals. 
Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and New York will suggest a 
title of nobility to every Englishman. While the author is putting 
this chapter to writing, his newspaper relates the death of one of the 
last of the Fairfaxes, the patrons of Washington. Near by the capi- 
tal city live the Calverts still, descendants of Lord Baltimore. The 
great republic has absorbed these into simple citizenship ; but the 
kingdom from which their titles were derived, continues to our day 
that ancient aristocracy recognized by our forefathers. There exist 
those badges, which, to retain or win, made Sir John Johnson a tory, 
and Benedict Arnold a traitor. In no country of Europe is the aris- 
tocracy so well denned or so powerful as in modern England. 
Legislatively it is irresponsible, being hereditary ; and while the 
House of Commons is the instrument of British legislation, the 
aristocracy, by their social and landed power, control a majority of 
places in it. A late English Review took the poll of the House of 
Commons, and showed that it contained two hundred and fifty per- 
sons, or more than one-third, either peers or related to peers, while 
out of the whole number of six hundred and fifty-eight members 
there were not two hundred who had not either " title, office, place, 
pension, church patronage, or immediate relatives deriving large sums 
from government abuses." 

In the United States our " best families " have derived their posi- 
tion, either directly or by inheritance, from wealth, chiefly acquired by 
commerce, manufactures, or speculation in lands, staples, and enter- 
prises. Not one of these people can be a "gentleman" in the 
English sense. With us, " gentleman" refers to the feeling and the 
breeding; with the English the "gentry" is a rich, leisurely, 
anciently derived class, yet untitled ; and, strange as it may seem, 
there are English " gentlemen " whose descent is so anciently estab- 
lished that a title would impair it : such regard, with haughty con- 
tempt, the new-made baronets or peers whose honors came from 
brewing good ale, or building railroads, or writing histories. 

Over English society the shadow of the aristocracy rests like the 
pillar of fire by night which guided the Hebrews. Its patronage, its 
lineage, its carriage, its unassailable place at the summit of society 
and government — and, also, we must admit, the fine unclegenerate 
graces of its members — enable it to absorb, corrupt, or charm the 
entire character of the common people. One by one the com- 
mons bow down to it, — now the aged knees of Carlyle, now the 



64 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

pregnftnt binges of the poet Kingsley, now in mid-flourish the young 
radical Disraeli abases himself. It is impossible for an American to 
conceive the vigor and influence of this aristocracy until he has visited 
England, and even then, if he should come within the circle of its 
social power, he might become its apologist. Then he can under- 
stand how mightily this aristocracy appeals to every ambitious young 
Englishman, lying, so to speak, across the threshold of his life, 
charming him with its conversation, helping him with its means and 
its favor at court, appealing to his imagination by its castles and 
woodlands, incorporating itself with his traditions, until he discovers 
himself its defender, and lays down his life in its worship and service. 
This was the highest motive of Nelson, to which I have referred 
already, — "A peerage, or a tomb in Westminster Abbey" amongst 
the bones of peers. 

It is from the United States that the English aristocracy has met 
its great opposition in our century. When Bright, Cobden, Hughes, 
Cobbett, Beales, and the young republicans of this and the last 
generation moved upon the aristocracy, it was with the history and 
constitution of the United States unfolded like the gospels. When, 
twenty }^ears ago, Bright and his friends, in and out of Parliament, 
raised the question as to whether the English government might not 
accept some profitable suggestions from the polity of the United 
States, a laugh went up from the forward partisans of the aristocracy 
too loud to be merry. Authors and novelists, under the patronage 
of this landed aristocracy, hastened to America to misrepresent it. 
And when, in 1861, the towering republic cracked from crest to 
centre, the talent and vigor of the British kingdom were developed 
against us in the most insidious, mocking, and persistent literature 
which has signalized the art of printing. If the republic is pros- 
pered in the future as in the past, men will not wonder half so much, 
at the end of the next century, at the cruise of the " Alabama" as at 
the leaders of the " Times " and the speeches of the peers. In them 
the British aristocracy reached high-water mark ; America maintained 
her unity, and British panegyric has been since as fulsome as its 
previous misrepresentation was abortive. 

In the principal American staple, cotton, the landed aristocracy of 
England met a no less powerful enemy. To us it was the Jleur de Us 
of a temporary aristocracy ; to the British aristocracy more destruc- 
tive than the wars of the red and the white roses. It built up in 
England mighty guilds of manufacturers, raised Manchester against 






THE BRITISH ARISTOCRACY. 65 

Westminster, produced Richard Cobden and the anti-corn law league, 
and routed the landed interest under its own prime minister, Sir 
Robert Peel. 

4i Nothing is so sacred as aristocracy," said Charles Kingsley in 
1865, " unless it be the monarch." 

And the most relentless enemy of the English aristocracy has been 
the dissenting church, which threw the Bible into the scale against 
both peers and king. It made Oliver Cromwell in England, and 
New, or Better, England in America. Those three batteries, never at 
rest, have steadily played upon the aristocracy, — New England, 
Manchester Cotton, Presbyterianism. And, at last, intellect wavers 
in its fealty to the nobility and gentry, for it has its choice of patrons 
now. We have come down to that remarkable period when Mr. 
Disraeli, after serving the aristocracy for so many years, finds it 
more honorable to refuse than to take a peerage. Yet, says his 
biographer, speaking of his first retirement from the cabinet : — 

" He had gained for all his future life the magical prefix of c Right 
Honorable ' to his name." 

But the period is more remarkable in this, that John Bright is a 
cabinet minister, he who said : — 

" You may have an ancient nobility in grand mansions, and parks, 
and great estates, and you may have an ecclesiastical hierarchy, 
covering with worldly pomp that religion whose virtue is humility. 
But, notwithstanding all this, the whole fabric is rotten, and doomed 
ultimately to fall ; for the great mass of the people on whom it is 
supported, is poor, and suffering, and degraded." 

This book, however, is not written for partisan objects, and we 
shall find good reason, in our descriptions of the aristocracy, to ac- 
count for their influence upon the British population. Let us address 
ourselves to this description. 

How began the British aristocracy? In the year 1066, a. d., the 
Duke of Normandy, of France, overthrew the Saxons at Hastings, in 
England. His army was rewarded with all the estates of the Saxons. 
This was the last and greatest property revolution that ever happened 
in Europe. The brutal conqueror and his soldiers seized the entire 
kingdom. The Indians were treated with far more ceremony and 
fairness by the English colonists in America. At a swoop every Sax- 
on's right went down ; it was the most exhaustive robbery in history. 
To William the Conqueror's officers the oldest English noblemen 
trace their lineage, and probably with truthfulness in some cases. 
9 



66 THE NEW WORLD COMPAEED WITH THE OLD. 

For instance, the Marquis of Westminster, said to be the richest 

peer in England, shows every in and out of his pedigree, back to one 

1 of Grosvenour, in the County of Normandy, France, a hundred 

and fifty years before the latter followed the fortunes of Duke William 

to England. 

With the estates of the Saxons, the Norman barons and counts 
found local names to append to their titles. Many of them married, 
in the second or third generation, Saxon women ; as, for example, the 
present Lord Derby's family name is Stanle} T ; for his Norman ances- 
tor, Adam de Aldithly, married Mabella Stanle}*, a Saxon woman. 

The Saxons were already more civilized people than the Normans. 
King Alfred had lived, who was said to have been the Saxon founder 
of Oxford University, whereas Duke William could not read, and he 
signed his name to all his state papers extant with a " cross." 

The English peers of the present clay, who do not trace their line- 
age to some officer of William the Conqueror, derive their titles b} T 
the favor of William's successors, the kings of England, and a mul- 
titude of causes led to this favor. Some peers are descended from the 
illegitimate children of the monarchs ; for, although " aristocracy" is 
a compound Greek word signifying " the government of the best," 
and good birth is defined by Aristotle to be " ancient (long-inherited) 
wealth and virtue," yet I doubt whether the most barefaced American 
politician of our time would commend to office such beings as began 
many ducal lines in England. It was a frequent custom for the sov- 
ereign to give a husband an office, a title, or a grant of land, and 
■ his wife for a mistress. This was the case close down to the 
n in which we write. Dukes, a grade higher, were the fruit of 
lacies between the king and some actress. Many families were 
ennobled for military service, for opportune loans of money to the 
\ or for mere reward of good company. In a later part of this 
chapter 1 will give some examples under each of these heads. 
How originated the present grades of British peers? 
The sovereign is the head of the British aristocracy. Then follows 
her family, the princes, or those immediately of the royal blood, 
i come three royal dukes, partly of ro} r al blood, twenty-six dukes, 
thirty-eight marquesses, two hundred and two earls, sixty-one viscounts, 
two hundred and five barons, — in all close to five hundred and 
peers, or nobles, including fourteen women, peeresses in their 
t (1854). Besides these peers there are nearly nine hundred 
. who arc not noblemen, and cannot sit in the House of Lords, 






THE BRITISH ARISTOCRACY. 67 

but are allowed the prefix of " sir," which gives them rank and prece- 
dence, without privilege. They belong to the aristocracy, however, 
and so do the gentry, or untitled folks of ancient family. 

Let us go back into the origin of these titles, for curiosity's sake. 

The Duke and the Count were Roman titles, military words (Latin 
dux, from the Latin verb ducere, to lead) invented by the later Roman 
emperors. The count was half-magistrate of Roman provinces ; the 
duke was the general of the same. When the northern nations de- 
scended upon Home they appropriated these titles. Very soon the 
military dukes turned about and put themselves ahead of the count- 
magistrates. After a time, the duke became so powerful in his dis- 
tant province, that he held it in his own right ; and this was the case 
with the Duke of Normandy when he invaded England. Himself and 
several other French dukes had reduced the possessions of the crown 
of France to a couple of cities. A marquess was the guardian of the 
Roman frontier marches, and this title, also, the nations of the middle 
ages appropriated from Italy. 

There were no dukes in England, except the Conqueror, Duke of 
Normandy, till two hundred and sixty-nine years after the Conquest, 
the only titles in William's army being Baron and Count. The first 
British duke was the Black Prince, so created by his father, King 
Edward III. Afterward several sons of kings were made dukes. 
Queen Elizabeth found on her accession only one duke remaining, — ■ 
Norfolk, — and him she executed. James I. made George Viiiiers 
Duke of Buckingham. Charles IT. made fifteen dukes, six of whom 
were his illegitimate children. The number of peers of all classes has 
steadily increased in England. There are now two hundred more 
than there were in the American Revolution, and three hundred and 
eighty more than in the time of Queen Anne. The eldest ducal 
family now in England is that of Norfolk ; among the wealthier ducal 
houses are Devonshire and Bedford. The Queen addresses a duke 
officially, as " Our right trusty and right entirely beloved cousin and 
counsellor," which must have required of the young Queen Victoria 
the devotion of a quarter's schooling to get it by heart. A duke's 
letters are endorsed, " His Grace," or, " The most noble, the Duke 

of ." It was from the Duke of York that New York was named, 

and not from York cit}-, and Maine took its name from the tradition 
that the Duchy of Maine, in France, was an English possession. Al- 
most every English duke has ascended through lesser degrees of 
nobility to his eminence. Thus, the Duke of Wellington was Lord 



68 THE NEW WOULD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

Wellesly, and his place was just missed by one of the Wesleys, found- 
ers of Methodism. With his title this last of the great dukes received 
about fourteen millions of dollars to support it. The Duke of Bedford 
is also Marquis of Tavistock, Baron Russell of Cheneys, Baron Rus- 
sell of Thornhaugh, and Baron Howland of Streatham. His eldest 
son takes, by courtesy, the second title. 

Marquess, the second rank of nobility, is old as the reign of Rich- 
ard II. The first marquess was Robert Vere, raised from Earl of 
Oxford to Marquess of Dublin. The oldest marquessate existing is 
that of Winchester. Probably the richest is that of the Marquess of 
Westminster, who owns almost the whole of that vast and luxurious 
district of London called Belgravia. A marquess is addressed, " My 
Lord Marquess." 

Earl is a Scandinavian title of lost antiquity. When first un- 
earthed it was applied to the custodian of an English county. Shrews- 
bury is the eldest earl ; and the second in time — perhaps the first in 
wealth and power — is Derby, whose name and whose son's name 
(Lord Stanley) are well known to us in America as associated with our 
late civil war, and the treaties attempted to be negotiated after it. 

Viscount, as an English title, goes back to about the time of the 
discovery of America, and the eldest viscount is he of Hereford. 
This was the rank of Lord Palmerston, English prime minister dur- 
ing our recent civil war, whose title expired at his death. 

Baron is a title of vague origin. The eldest extant, Le de Spencer, 
elates as remotely as the 3 r ear 12G4. 

The term " cousin, " applied b}^ the sovereign to all peers save a 
baron, arose from the fact that there was one English monarch, 
Henry IV., who was related to every earl in the kingdom. 

The above five grades of nobles constitute the peers of England, 
and they make a body nearly twice as numerous as both houses of 
the United States Congress. They were created in two ways besides 
original military rank and investiture of lands, namely, by Writ of 
Summons, to come to Parliament and help the Queen with counsel, or 
by Letters Patent, naming the exact rank and the circumstances under 
which the patent is conferred. In former times with every such writ 
or patent an estate was given. At present it is an expensive favor to 
be made a peer. The stamps on a duke's patent cost one thousand 
seven hundred and fifty dollars in gold. A baron pays for his crea- 
tion two thousand one hundred dollars in gold. The privileges of the 
peerage are now of little consequence, if we except right of exemp- 



THE BRITISH ARISTOCRACY. G9 

tion from sitting on juries, freedom from common arrest, privilege of 
seeing the Queen on public business, and trial by one's peers in 
cases of treason and felony. 

The baronets, next below the peers, were created out of the pe- 
cuniary necessities of James I., who wanted money, first to settle 
Ulster, in Ireland, then to "plant" Nova Scotia, the present discon- 
tented neighbor of the United States. He asked five thousand five 
hundred dollars a head to make baronets in this way. 

The sovereign creates a peer to be, in himself and his issue, defender 
and adviser of the crown and protector of the royal prerogatives. 
The nearer a peer is to the throne, in office or duty, the closer is he 
to the fountain of honor and power. Hence many of the nobility are 
merely attendants upon the Queen. 

Madame d'Arblay, a lady of the court of the wife of George III., 
tells many stories illustrative of the absurd deference of the aristocracy 
at that court during the American Revolution. Her employment was 
to robe the Queen-Consort, and to keep her snuff-box well replenished. 
No person was allowed to drive past the royal family on the road ; none 
could sit or eat in their presence, nor pass by the open door of any 
room in which they were, nor speak to them unless requested. If met 
by them anywhere, the courtier must stand still, and go backward, if 
retiring. When the} r entered any room, all the people within it had 
to rise, fall back against the wall, and give the princes all the middle 
of the room exclusively, and when they entered the house of any 
nobleman they brought along what persons they pleased, ecclesiastics 
or concubines, and had entire control of the host's mansion. Madame 
D'Arblay used to be ready to drop from hunger and long standing, but 
the Queen took no notice of it. Commenting on the above, an English 
historian, Mr. John Wade, writing in our own time, quaintly says : — 

Ci As princes are of ancient institution, these rules have, doubtless, 
a sage and politic meaning." 

The great offices around the sovereign held by peers are : — 

1. The Lord Great Chamberlain, custodian of Westminster Pal- 
ace, decorator of Westminster Hall and Abbe}^ for state trials and 
coronations, ticket-giver for Parliament ; in short, the Queen's Ser- 
ge an t-at- Arms. This office is hereditary, and, owing to some split or 
other in the lineage, it is now held by two noblemen, relations. 

2. The Earl-Marshal, a sort of Queen's proclamation maker, the 
preparer of programmes for royal christenings, etc. The Duke oi 
Norfolk is hereditary Marshal. 



70 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

3. Hereditary Grand Almoner. This noble functionary does noth- 
ing whatever but toss medals round Westminster Abbey at the Queen's 
coronation. 

The other offices around the sovereign are filled by the Queen by 
writ, that is, the prime minister of the political party in power nomi- 
nates for them, and they are part of the spoils of victory. Some of the 
names of these ennobled servants are Lord Steward of the Household, 
salary, 10,000 dollars ; Treasurer, ditto, 4,500 dollars ; Comptrollers, 
ditto, 4,500 dollars ; Master, ditto, 5,600 dollars ; Lord Chamberlain, 
10,000 dollars ; Vice-Chamberlain, 4,500 dollars ; several Lords in Wait- 
ing, 3,500 dollars ; several Grooms in Waiting, 1,750 dollars ; a corps 
of Gentlemen at Arms and a corps of Yeomen of the Guard, select sol- 
diers and " gentle" officers, paid from 5,000 dollars, captains, to 300 
dollars, privates ; Groom of the Stole, who watches the Queen's bed, 
nominally, 10,000 dollars ; twelve Lords of the Bedchamber, defunct 
or nearly so, 5,000 dollars a head ; Mistress of the Eobes, 2,500 dollars ; 
ten Ladies of the Bedchamber 2,500 dollars a head, nine Bedchamber 
Women 1 ,500 dollars ; eight Maids of Honor, 2,000 dollars ; Master of the 
Horse, 12,500 dollars ; Clerk Marshal and Chief Equerry, 5,000 dollars ; 
eight Equerries and Pages of Honor, 3,750 dollars to 1,000 dollars; 
Master of the Buckhounds, 8,000 dollars. Contrast all this array of 
sinecures with the household officers of President of the United States, 
namely, two Secretaries and a Marshal of the District of Columbia. 
If he wishes more help he must get a private soldier or two detailed. 
The Queen's coachmen, postilions, and footmen cost almost sixty thou- 
sand dollars a year besides. All this useless court must be main- 
tained by the social argument of an aristocracy, who might else out- 
blaze the sovereign, and that the Queen's poor relations may not be 
laughed at by the peers they receive enormous pensions. Old Hamp- 
ton Court Palace, near London, is a home for decayed nobility who 
must not be turned into the street. This palace costs a hundred and 
fifty thousand dollars a year to keep it up, exclusive of numerous 
pensions paid its inmates. 

An English statement said of the Duke of Grafton : — 

" This hereditary pensioner is paid annually, out of the excise reve- 
nue, forty-two thousand dollars, and out of the post-office revenues seven- 
teen thousand dollars. The original pensioner was one of the numer- 
ous illegitimate offspring of Charles II. ; for whose royal amours the 
people of this age are still called upon to pay. These pensions have 
now (1857) been paid to the Dukes of Grafton for a period of one 






THE BRITISH ARISTOCRACY. 71 

hundred and seventy-three years ; so that the maintenance of this 
single peerage alone has cost the English people, in hard cash, no less 
a sum than ten millions two hundred and ninety thousand dollars ! " 
I have said that the English aristocracy are the proudest nobles 
in Europe. This rises mainly from their greater riches. In ancient 
lineage they can at best trace their origin to the countries of their 
neighbors on the Continent. The Queen's house, that of Guelph, 
claims Italy for its origin. Tennyson sang in his welcome of the 
bride of the Prince of Wales : — 

" Saxon and Norman and Dane are we, 

But each all Dane in our welcome of thee." 

If there is any advantage in English over foreign aristocracy, it is 
that the former was created directly by the sovereign, and has never 
been obliterated by a revolution, like the ancien noblesse of France. 

The Venetian aristocracy sprang from rich commercial houses ; 
that of Florence, from bankers and money-lenders. In Germany 
and France the possession of land was almost the exclusive source 
of titles, and hence von and cZe, prefixes, in German and French 
(meaning "of"), denote the estate of the noble. Baron Yon Hum- 
boldt means " The Baron of Humboldt," and it is an affectation, 
generally speaking, for an American to retain the prefix de. By 
buying a fine estate, a Frenchman generally assumed to ennoble I 
self, and hence, when the French Revolution broke out, there were 
eighty thousand French families claiming to be noble, " not three 
thousand of whom," says an English writer, lugubriously, " were of 
ancient lineage." The French aristocracy was crushed out by one 
decree of the French National Assembly (Republican) on the 18th of 
June, 1790, which said: "An hereditary nobility is an institution 
incompatible with a free state," and all titles, arms, and liveries were 
forthwith abolished. Two years afterward all the records of the 
nobility were burned. The present French nobles are merely de- 
scendants of Napoleon's marshals and officers. All this will be ex- 
plained in the chapter on French peers. Spain claims to have the 
purest nobility in Christendom. The word "hidalgo" means the 
"son of Somebody," and the class at large goes by the name of 
grandees there. 

The British aristocracy, however, keeps its position by wealth, the 
profits of the vast estates hereditary in it, and British law and legis- 
lation are all suborned to keep these intact. There are in England, 



72 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

it is said, no more than thirty thousand proprietors of the land ; in 
Scotland and Ireland only nine thousand. The laws which perpetuate 
this monstrous system are called entail and primogeniture, and that 
the possession of land may not be burdensome to the aristocracy, it 
is taxed inconsiderably, while the landless masses pay the enormous 
expenses of the court, the army and navy, and the civil list. 

The cost and character of some of these vast aristocratic estates 
Will stagger an American reader. The largest real-estate incomes of 
America are probably derived from corporations like Trinity Church, 
Kew York, or the Pacific railroads ; and from a few private estates in 
the chief cities, like those of Longworth in Cincinnati, Girard in 
Philadelphia, and Astor in New York. What shall we say of the 
Marquis of Westminster, on whose ground, in the fashionable part 
of London, dwell three hundred thousand people? or of Earl Derby, 
who owned the whole site of one manufacturing town of fifty thousand 
inhabitants? The Duke of Bedford is scarcely less opulent in Lon- 
don real estate. And these extravagant possessions were the gift of 
kings in barbarous times, transmitted intact under the protection of 
laws no less extraordinary. 

In this country of the United States, we travel long lines of rail- 
way, and see that the farms and dwellings are almost uniform. The 
people, rich or poor, follow the impulses of emigration. It is rare 
to find three generations of one famity living upon the same family 
estate. In England, how r ever, the contrary is the rule. Few quit the 
ancient home, be it castle or cottage. The conditions of men do not 
change. The splendid modern mansion of the nobleman, supplied 
with water and gas by modern contrivances, stands beside the pic- 
turesque ruins of his immemorial forefathers. The ivy-covered towers 
and battlements overhang the Mansard roof and the polished panes 
of modern window-glass. Only time has clone its work of disintegra- 
tion ; the name of the estate is the same ; the family is the same ; 
the tenantry of the living lord are children of the peasants of his 
barbaric ancestors. This is the difference between England and 
America : the land is the enemy and conqueror of the one ; the other 
is the conqueror of the land. When mother earth decides against the 
poor, then are they poor indeed. 

Let us take up some illustrations of the estates of English noble- 
men. 

The Marquis of Westminster has four immense and elaborate 
country seats, namely, Eaton Hall, Ilalkin Castle, Motcombe House, 



THE BRITISH ARISTOCRACY. 73 

and Fonthill, in the County of Wilts. Besides these he has a splen- 
did city residence on Grosvenor Square. His pictures are valued at 
three quarters of a million dollars. His income has been said to be 
two hundred thousand dollars a week. The motto on the arms of this 
gentleman is, " The virtue, not the mere lineage, of race ; " but his 
possessions are great enough to comprehend both. 

The Duke of Bedford, who owns a great part of that district of 
London called Bloomsbury, derived his possessions from a character- 
istic accident. His ancestor was a plain squire, John Russell, who 
lived on the English coast, near Weymouth, in the time of Henry 
VII. At that precise time an Archduke of Austria was about sailing 
from his province of Flanders to Spain. A storm arose in the Eng- 
lish Channel, and drove him, much " demoralized," into the port of 
Weymouth. Now, plain John Russell's relative was sheriff, or some- 
thing of the sort, to that part of the country. He posted off, rapidly 
to the court, to tell of this mighty visitor, and left the Archduke in 
the company of John Russell. John proved to be a good fellow at 
an anecdote, a ride, or a dinner, and when the sheriff came back the 
Austrian was so much infatuated with plain John Russell that he 
insisted upon carrying him up to court. The people at court were 
also delighted with Russell. He was retained there as a courtier, 
and ennobled. In process of time he received an estate out of the 
grand general confiscation of Abbey lands, and then Charles II., long- 
afterward, made his posterity Dukes of Bedford. The present Duke, 
inheritor of John Russell's good luck, is also the descendant of that 
Lord Russell who was executed for treason b}^ the Stuarts, and 
brother of Lord John Russell, the late English prime minister and con- 
temporary of William H. Seward. He is said to pay Lord John, the 
genius of the family, an annuity for keeping up the family talent. 
The latter has also three residences, or, as they are called in English 
parlance, a " seat," a residence, and a " town house." Lord John 
Russell was made a peer in 1861. His eldest son is called Viscount 
Amberly, while the eldest son of the Duke of Bedford gets the title of 
Earl Grosvenor. The motto of them all is, " What will be, will be ! " 
The motto and arms of a peer are presented by the sovereign when 
the patent of creation is issued. These are prepared by an old insti- 
tution called the College of Heralds, and the science of heraldry is as 
immovably maintained in England as the Lord's Prayer. 

The book of the peerage is regularly issued in London at the first 
of every year, and it is a huge, gilded volume, like a New York street 
10 



74 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

directory in size, of thirteen hundred pages. It tells all the deaths, 
marriages, and births of peers and baronets in the year expired, names 
the children of peers who have married commoners, recites extinct 
and disputed titles and those " in abeyance ;" and all this is exhibited 
a solemnity of diction and a minuteness of detail which would 
seem ludicrous to an American. The volume for 1868 was the thir- 
tieth edition of this ponderous dictionary of dignities. 

So immense was the Duke of Queensbury's estate that the mere 
legacy duty upon the settlement of it amounted to seven hundred thou- 
sand dollars. A property lawsuit between the Talbots and Berkleys 
lasted one hundred and twenty years. Frequently great families inter- 
marry to unite their landed estates. Thus, in the Cavendish family 
there are two dukes. The father of the present Duchess of Hamilton, 
John Fauqhar, gave one million four hundred thousand dollars for his 
estate of Fonthill Abbey, second-hand, and the money which reared 
this extravagant property came from slave labor in Jamaica. The Duke 
of Athol planted at one time fifteen thousand acres of woodland. 

The life of the British aristocracy should be, in the sense of self- 
love and the gratification of dominion, delightful bej T ond comparison. 
At the head of the court and politics of a boundless empire, chief 
possessors of an insular kingdom singularly endowed by nature, and 
grand and various in its landscapes, visited by such dews as make 
the foliage green, the grain and grasses big and juicy, and the cattle 
and the horses large and strong, — to be a separate and a grander 
class in such a kingdom must be a more national dream of empire 
than Alexander ever realized. 

Take a single exemplification, — the Duke of Devonshire, of the 
ly of Cavendish. One of his numerous estates is Chatsworth, 
or the u Palace of the Peak," in Derbyshire. This nobleman belongs 
be house of Cavendish, and he is called, in the parlance of Eng- 
land, "a noble and generous landlord." Chatsworth is about forty 
s from Manchester. The estate is twelve miles in circumference. 
re arc eighty acres of mown lawn in the gardens alone, and forty 
acres in the arboretum, or nursery of specimen trees. The estate is 
entered by a grand gate, and over the splendid woodlands the great 
mansion is seen to rise, far off, a square palladian building, of vast 
proportions, erected in the time of William III. At the gate is a 
hotel for the accommodation of visitors, who are permitted to see the 
palace and grounds freely. Some little distance off is the village of 
Edensor, owned entirely by the Duke, in the midst of which is the 






THE BRITISH ARISTOCRACY. 75 

parish church which he controls almost absolutely, filled with the 
monuments of the Cavendish fafnily. Entering the park, one sees 
close before him the River Derwent, crossed by a stone bridge, with 
statues above all the piers, and the velvet lawn be}T>nd, cropped 
close to the river's brink, is adorned with frequent figures in stone, 
marble, and bronze. The house itself, containing the masterpieces 
of the sculptor, Grinling Gibbons, is decorated with marbles from 
all foreign countries ; the windows are composed of the largest panes 
of plate glass, and all the sashes are gilded. A grand vestibule and 
hall, rilled with noble statuary, and effigies wearing the armor of the 
Cavendish ancestors, leads to a noble series of state apartments, 
hung with rich tapestries, embroidered in remote times, and exhibiting 
such scenes as the voyages of Ulysses and episodes of the Crusades. 
Canova, Thorwaldsden, and the best modern sculptors, have made 
this mansion illustrious with their works. The noblest paintings of 
the masters of the middle ages line the walls. Through armories, 
drawing-rooms, dining-rooms, great state bedchambers, amongst 
whose furniture are the coronation thrones of George III. and Wil- 
liam IV., — which were the perquisites of former Dukes of Devon- 
shire, as lords chamberlain, — by billiard rooms, through museums, 
filled with articles of science and virtuoso, one wanders until he 
tires of splendor, and then seeks relief in the gardens, the like of 
which, public or private, we do not possess in America. There are 
gates made of a single stone, moving upon a pivot ; vast houses of 
glass, wherein float, in great tanks of water, Victoria regias, whose 
leaves will almost support a man's weight, yet are fluttered by the 
artificial motion of a wheel in the water. "There are fort} x thousand 
rhododendrons alone/' says the description of the gardens. The 
conservatory is probably the most extensive in the world. It is 
approached hy an artificial gorge of rocks, made up of great masses 
tossed wildly together, and through this a carriage-way leads, by 
such cunning curves, that one does not see the conservatory until lie 
comes bolt upon it. There is no necessity for dismounting ; the car- 
riage-road makes the circuit of the inside of the mighty glass building, 
which covers one acre, is two hundred and seventy-six feet long, one 
hundred and twenty-six feet wide, and sixty-five feet high, is supplied 
with fuel by a subterranean tramway, and warmed by seven miles 
of pipes. These pipes alone cost seven thousand five hundred dol- 
lars, and the building contains forty miles of sash bars. From an 
interior gallery one can look down upon a jungle of tropical trees, 



76 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

fruit, and flowers. Here grow the banana, the India rubber, and 
the dragon tree, the talipot, palm, and the American magnolia, and 
lotus and papyrus float in tanks. Without there rises a tower, sur- 
mounted by the ducal flag, approached by a cyclopean aqueduct of 
lofty arches, which carries up water from a reservoir of six acres near 
by. This water is distributed to the numerous fountains, one of 
which is a single jfit geant, flung up lonesomely in the solitude of a 
screen of lime-trees, whose tops it tries to reach, two hundred and 
sixty-seven feet in the air. Another, and the greatest fountain, is a 
colossal flight of steps, surmounted by a temple. Touch a valve, and 
from every crevice of this temple water will burst, which, tumbling in 
cascade down the flights of steps, disappears in the ground at the 
bottom. 

The stables of the Duke are also marvellous in the number and 
breed of the horses, the number of which is not stated, but in 1862 
the author counted the horses in the stable of the Earl of Derby, and 
found them to pass one hundred and fifty. The hounds were not less 
remarkable in breed and number. All the grounds are filled with 
rabbits, hares, pheasants, and deer. Picked cattle graze in the 
moist meadows, of stature and stride novel to Americans. There are 
lodges all round the park, and game laws, besides, are made in the 
Duke's favor. His many farms are spread round the country, for he 
owns not only the park, but all the outlying landscapes ; yet Chats- 
worth is only one of his " seats." Others are Oldcotes and Hard- 
wick Hall, the latter the prison of Mary, Queen of Scots, which bears, 
in its architecture, the monogram of " Old Bess of Hard wick, the 
greatest member of the house of Cavendish." She was the wife of 
an usher to Cardinal Wolsey, who obtained his share of the monastery 
lands, seized from the church, for the spoil of the courtiers. She was 
married four times, to men of large estate, in every case, and inter- 
marrying her children with those of her husbands, their combined 
lands and riches were transmitted to her posterity. 

An instance of a different origin is that of Blenheim Park, 
presented to the Duke of Marlborough for gaining the battle of 
Blenheim. The mansion alone cost a million and a half of dollars, 
and it is carved in trophies, surrounded by triumphal arches, col- 
umns, and statues, adorned with hanging woods above a lake of two 
hundred and sixty acres, which is in turn crossed by a noble bridge. 
The old oaks and cedars are planted in battalions to reproduce the 



THE BRITISH ARISTOCRACY. 77 

plan of the battle of Blenheim. Twenty-seven hundred acres com- 
prise this park, and the circuit of it is twelve miles. 

These are scarcely exceptional instances. Similar noble estates 
lie in every part of the United Kingdom. With education, means, 
and taste, the aristocracy has refined horticulture and agriculture 
beyond any previous condition they have gained. The hospitality 
of these large estates is unbounded, after one has passed the arctic 
circle of an English introduction. 

N. P. Willis, while a member of the American legation in England, 
had extraordinarily rare chances to observe the home life of Eng- 
lish noblemen. I take some pages from his description of a week 
spent at Gordon Castle, which Mr. William Howitt, an English 
authority, has pronounced " the most perfect and graphic description 
of English aristocratical life, in the country, which was ever written." 

" Dismounting at Gordon Castle, in the midst of its noble park, I 
followed a boy through a hall lined with statues, deers' horns, and 
armor, and was ushered into a large chamber, looking out on a park, 
extending, with its lawns and woods, to the edge of the horizon. 
; Who is at the castle ? ' I asked, as the boy busied himself in 
unstrapping my portmanteau. ' Oh, a great many, sir.' He stopped 
in his occupation, and began counting on his fingers a long list 
of lords and ladies. ' And how many sit down to dinner ? ' — ' Above 
ninety, sir, beside the Duke and Duchess.' — ' That will do ; ' and 
off tripped my slender gentleman, with his laced jacket, giving the 
fire a terrible stir-up on his way out, and turning back to inform me 
that the dinner hour was seven precisely. 

" A tall, white-haired gentleman, of noble physiognomy, but sin- 
gularly cordial address, entered, with a broad red ribbon across his 
breast, and welcomed me most heartily to the castle. The gong 
sounded at the next moment, and in our way clown he named over 
his other guests, and prepared me, in a measure, for the introduction 
which followed. The drawing-room was crowded like a soiree. The 
Duchess, a tall and very handsome woman, with a smile of the most 
winning sweetness, received me at the door, and I was presented 
successively to every person present. Dinner was announced imme- 
diately, and the difficult question of precedence being sooner settled 
than I had ever seen it before in so large a party, we passed through 
files of servants to the dining-room. 

" It was a large and very lofty hall, supported at the ends by 
marble columns, within which was stationed a band of music, playing 



78 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

delightfully. The walls were lined with full-length family pictures, 
from old knights in armor to the modern dukes in kilt of the Gordon 
I ; and on the sideboards stood services of gold-plate, the most 
gorgeously massive and the most beautiful in workmanship I have 
ever seen. There were, among the vases, several large coursing- 
cups, won by the Duke's hounds, of exquisite shape and ornament. 

" I fell into my place between a gentleman and a very beautiful 
woman of perhaps twenty-two, neither of whose names I remembered, 
though I had just been introduced. The Duke probably anticipated 
as much, and as I took my seat he called out to me, from the top of 

the table, that I had, on my right, Lady , the most agreeable 

woman in Scotland ! It was unnecessary to say that she was the 
most lovely, 

"■ I have been struck everywhere in England with the beauty 
of the higher classes, and as I looked around me upon the aristo- 
cratic company at the table, I thought I had never seen ' Heav- 
en's image double-stamped as man and noble,' so unequivocally 
clear. 

" The band ceased playing when the ladies left the table ; the gen- 
tlemen closed up ; conversation assumed a merrier cast ; coffee and 
liquors were brought in, w T hen the wines began to be circulated more 
slowly, and at eleven there was a general move to the drawing-room. 
Cards, tea, music, filled up the time till twelve, and then the ladies 
took their departure, and the gentlemen sat down to supper. I got 
to bed somewhere about two o'clock ; and thus ended an evening 
which I had anticipated as stiff and embarrassing, but which is 
marked in my tablets as one of the most social and kindly I have 
had the good fortune to record on my travels. At breakfast the Duke 
sat laughing at the head of the table, with a newspaper in his hand, 
3sed in a coarse shooting-jacket and colored cravat; the Duchess 
was in a plain morning-dress and cap of the simplest character; and 
the high-born women about the table, whom I had left glittering with 
jewels and dressed in all the attractions of fashion, appeared in the 
simplest coiffure, and a toilet of studied plainness. The ten or 
twelve noblemen present were engrossed with their letters or news- 
papers over tea and toast, — and in them, perhaps, the transforma- 
tion was still greater. The soigne man of fashion of the night before, 
faultless in costume and distinguished in his appearance, — in the 
full force of the term, — was enveloped now in a coat of fustian, with 
a Coarse waistcoat of plaid, a gingham cravat, and hob-nailed shoes 



THE BRITISH ARISTOCRACY. 79 

for shooting ; and in place of the gay hilarity of the supper-table 
wore a face of calm indifference, and ate his breakfast and read the 
paper in a rarely broken silence. I wondered, as I looked about ine, 
what would be the impression of many people in my own country, 
could they look in upon that plain part}', aware that it was composed 
of the proudest nobility and the highest fashion of England. 

"Breakfast in England is a confidential and unceremonious hour, 
and servants are general!}' dispensed with. Between breakfast and 
lunch the ladies were generally invisible, and the gentlemen rode or 
shot, or played billiards, or kept in their rooms. At two o'clock, a 
dish or two of hot game, and a profusion of cold meats, were set on 
the small tables in the dining-room, and everybod}" came in for a 
kind of lounging half-meal, which occupied perhaps an hour. 
Thence all adjourned to the drawing-room, under the windows of 
which were drawn up carriages of all descriptions, with grooms, out- 
riders, footmen, and saddle-horses for gentlemen and ladies. Parties 
were then made up for riding or driving. The number at the dinner- 
table of Gordon Castle was seldom less than thirty ; but the company 
was continually varied b} r departures and arrivals. No sensation was 
made by either one side or the other. A travelling-carriage dashed 
up to the door, was disburdened of its load, and drove round to the 
stables, and the question was seldom asked, ' Who has arrived ? ' You 
are sure to see new faces at dinner, and an addition of half a dozen 
to the party made no perceptible difference in an} T thing. Leave- 
takings were arranged in the same quiet way. Adieus were made to 
the Duke and Duchess, and to no one else, except he happened to en- 
counter the parting guest upon the staircase, or were more than a 
common acquaintance." 

He is a poor nobleman who has not also a fine 'town house' in 
London, to which he repairs in the spring, and takes his place at court 
and in society. But the real life of the aristocrat is in the country, 
where he is not overshadowed by the sovereign, but all the county 
turns out to his fox-hunt ; his " patronage " is solicited by every moun- 
tebank and cricket-club, and flattery lifts him above the degenerac}' of 
a mere voluptuary's life. He is not simply rich, but he is a peer of 
the realm. Still, this o'erdeserved human state leads to inflated 
heights of self-esteem, and often to depths of baseness. 

While Hamilton, Jefferson, and Washington were t} T pes of the 
American Revolution, the English statesman, Fox, their warmest ad- 
mirer, — he who addressed Washington in terms of reverence, and 



80 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

was also Bonaparte's friend, lived the life of a roue and a gam- 
bler. His father gave him guineas for the gaming table while 
yet a lad, " that his spirit might not be broken," and left him seven 
hundred and fifty thousand dollars to pay his debts. Within a few 
years he was deeply embarrassed as before. Said Gibbon, the his- 
torian : — 

" Fox prepared himself for the holy work of emancipating the 
clergy, by passing twenty-two hours in the pious exercise of hazard. 
His devotion cost him live hundred pounds an hour— in all eleven 
thousand pounds." 

Again a wild friend found him, after a night's debauch at the 
gaming table, calmly perusing Herodotus in the original Greek. He 
exclaimed that Fox seemed in no whit repining : — 

" What would you have me do," said Fox, " when I have lost my 
last shilling?" 

The great Lord Chatham, under whose administration Quebec and 
Canada were annexed to the English colonies, turned his stomach 
with strong ale, till gout and temporary fits of insanity marked his 
career ; while William Pitt, the humiliator of France and Bonaparte, 
died of dyspepsia, induced by close attention to the bottle, so that 
Malmsbury remarked, " He died of old age at forty-six as much as 
if he had been ninety." 

There are few books more entertaining in criminal literature than 
" Romances of the Peerage," " Crimes of the Nobility and Gentr}^," 
and others of standard authority. In our own day the giddy careers 
of the Duke of Hamilton and of the Marquis of Hastings are fresh 
in the mind of the reader. Gossip alleges that at least one of the 
children of the Queen lacks " balance " for his eminence. It is, 
indeed, an anomalous, though an ancient, condition of society, for a 
few people to hold all the honors, control all the intellect, and 
possess nearly all the land in a kingdom. This will not stand the 
test of an age of mass-meetings and cheap newspapers. In the 
interest of the land, laws have been mainly made in England down to 
the repeal of the corn laws. It will hardly be credited now, that, 
under the plausible and selfish dry of, " Protect the British farmer ! " 
the millions of British people had to pay a high duty on imported 
wheat down to 1840. This tax was the cause of starvation and 
hunger throughout the kingdom, yet it was imposed entirely in the 
interests of the landholders, the aristocracy. The Duke of Welling- 
ton coerced the passage of its repeal through the House of Lords, 



THE BRITISH ARISTOCRACY. 81 

himself under the coercion of Sir Robert Peel, the enlightened prime 
minister. 

A few Americans have been ennobled or knighted in England. 
The title of Lord Lyndhurst, which expired about 1866, was shared 
by his lady, formerly Susan Clarke, of Boston. He had been an 
American Tory. The illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin was 
knighted for his toryism in the American war, and Benjamin West, 
our Pennsylvania colonial artist, became " Sir Benjamin." 

I have omitted reference to the various orders of knighthood in 
England. These confer honor and are much coveted ; but they do 
not confer nobility, and the honor is not hereditary. The orders of 
British knighthood are, The Garter, The Thistle, Saint Patrick, The 
Bath, The Star of India, and one or two more, of no consequence. 
The Garter, with its well-known motto of " Honi soit qui mat y pense" 
is the proudest order of knighthood in England, perhaps in Europe, 
with the sovereign at its head, and twenty-five knights. It was 
founded in 1350, meets once every year at St. George's Chapel, 
Windsor, and the installation fees are twenty-two hundred dollars. 
Amongst its present members are Louis Napoleon ; the Kings of Bel- 
gium, Denmark, Portugal, and Prussia ; Derby and Russell, the 
statesmen, and the second Duke of Wellington. The Thistle is a 
Scotch order of eighteen knights. The Knights of St. Patrick, Irish, 
number twenty-four. The Bath is a military order, with nearly a 
thousand officers, knights. 

Such is an outline of the British aristocracy, and if we come to 
examine the causes of their anomalous influence over an active and 
practical kingdom, we shall find these resolved to two, — their social 
monopoly and their monopoly of the land. As a country, particularly 
a small country like England, grows richer and more densely peopled, 
the high circles of society and the land become less accessible. 
Riches seek recognition ; cramped people want land. And going 
still one degree further in our inquiry, the land monopoly is the 
parent of the social monopoly. A beggared and landless aristocracy 
has no chance for perpetuation, as the history of the Venetian and 
French nobility in our century proves. The British nobles, seizing 
all the land, first from the Saxons, then from the Catholic church 
when they discarded it, adopted the laws of entail and primogeniture, 
by which their great estates were transmitted unbroken. Perhaps 
this is not the least of the causes which have driven millions of 
British subjects to America and Polynesia, — a longing to own the 
11 



82 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD, 

land monopolized by so few at home. The land is the best riches. It 
is most grudgingly held in England. The millions pay rent, the 
hundreds receive it* The better the skill and enterprise of the mil- 
lions, the dearer grows the rent of the land under their feet. An 
aristocracy, thus endowed, is not the shadow of an ancient lineage 
merely It is a powerful circle, which, despite the democratic 
tendencies of the age, keeps its ranks unbroken and commands 
homage. Yet, despite its social graces, and the appeal it makes to 
our love of pomp and luxury, its virtues touch our imagination 
alone ; for by the light of this century it is as baneful and unjust 
as the worst relic of barbarism which has perished. The first step to 
take in its overthrow is to do justice : Tax the land ! Remove 
the burdens of an extravagant government from the poor and 
landless, and lay them upon the ground. Thus taxed, acre by 
acre, the vast estates and parks will become expensive luxuries, 
and must, though reluctantly, be broken up. With land avail- 
able, the commons will feel a new independence, and industiy and 
patience will rear a rival court ; wealth, virtue, and intellect will 
compose a new aristocracy. 




HOUSES OF THE LEGISLATURES. 

1— Modern Capitol, Rome. 2— Palace of the Corps Legislatif, Paris. 3— Capitol, 

Washington. 4— Houses of Parliament, London. 5— Parliament 

Houses, Ottawa, Canada. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE SENATE AND THE HOUSE OF LORDS. 

United States Capitol and British Houses of Parliament compared, — Sketches of Westmin- 
ster Hall, Abbey, and Palace. — The House of Lords architecturally. — The lords and 
the senators in their seats, relatively. — Officers of the House of Lords. — Business of 
that body. — Descriptions of various scenes in that house. — Opening of Parliament. — 
Impeachment. — Trial of a peer. — Riotous scenes. - — Parliamentary law and manual. 

A mile from either arm of the Potomac River, on a commanding 
hill, ninety feet above tide-water, stands the United States Capitol. 
It is of Greek architecture, — in order, Corinthian. Two white mar- 
ble wings, connected by a middle building of white freestone, over 
the latter of which rises a white dome of iron, — that is the Capitol 
at Washington. Take three dominos, and place two of them length- 
wise against the ends of the middle one, stand a pullet's egg on the 
middle domino, and you obtain a suggestive miniature of the build- 
ing. It is the most extensive and costly edifice on the American 
continent. It cost twelve millions of dollars, covers one hundred 
and fifty three thousand one hundred and twelve square feet, or about 
three and a half acres of ground, is seven hundred and fifty-one feet 
long by two hundred and thirty-nine feet wide, and the dome is more 
than two hundred and eighty-seven feet high, or two hundred and 
seventeen feet, clear, above the main building. 

The Capitol, as it stands, is the work of many persons, of whom 
but two or three are noticeable. Dr. Thornton made the first design, 
said b} r Washington to combine " grandeur, simplicity, and conven- 
ience." The architects retained but two or three features of Thorn- 
ton's design, and preferred one by Mr. S. Hallet. B. H. Latrobe, of 
an enterprising Maryland family, began to rebuild the Capitol on 
Hallet's plan, after the British burned it, and a Mr. Bulfinch com- 
pleted it. It was thirty-five years after the laying of the corner-stone 
before a completed national Capitol existed in America. 

John Quincy Adams was the first of our presidents who ever sent 
a message into an entire Capitol building. In like manner the exten- 

83 



84 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

sion of the Capitol has already (1869) occupied nearly twenty years. 
Washington laid the corner-stone of the old, Webster of the new Cap- 
itol. The Brunelleschi of the house is Thomas U. Walter ; the Ghi- 
berti of it is Thomas Crawford. 

Walter is incomparably the national architect. He built the 
Girard College, at Philadelphia ; and on that building and the 
wings and dome of the Capitol, his fame will rest. 

This dome is the most ambitious structure in America. It is a 
hundred and eight feet higher than the Washington Monument, at 
Baltimore, sixty-eight feet higher than that of Bunker Hill, and twen- 
ty-three feet higher than Trinity Church tower, New York. It is the 
only considerable dome of iron in the world, and it is, in this respect, 
significant of the era of the republic and its industry. It is, also, the 
only piece of ornamental architecture undertaken by the republic 
which is at all worthy of our wealth and art. We must have halls 
for Congress, and custom-houses and post-offices ; but we need not 
have domes. In this isolated case the country has consented to an 
expensive edifice for other than practical considerations. More than 
all, the dome is the real monument of the great war for the Union and 
the overthrow of American slavery. It was begun in 1856, with the 
rise of the Republican party ; it was finished in 1865, when the Con- 
federate flag surrendered on the last field, and the defeated party came 
back to plead for representation under the dome of the Union. The 
echo of almost every hammer driven upon it, was returned by a cannon. 
No day, not the darkest clay of the war, saw the workmen frightened 
from its scaffolds. With Early thundering on the east, and Lee far 
in the northern- rear, and Beauregard at Fairfax Court-house, and 
Mosby and Gilmore almost at Arlington, the flies at work upon this 
eyrie of liberty crawled steadily up their filament ladders ; the steam- 
whistle blew the signal for every girder, as they sent it aloft ; like a 
steamship at sea, with the storm of war beating across every horizon, 
the engine under the dome never put out its fires ; its lanterns burnt 
every night. 

The successor of Mr. Walter is Mr. Clarke, his pupil. Mr. Clarke 
occupies a wooden cabin, in a green park across the way from the 
Capitol. There he sits, much of the time, making models and 
drawings, ciphering up the cost of marble per foot and paint per keg, 
with Mr. Sears, his chief assistant, at a desk near by, and an appren 
tice or two draughting in India ink. 

Mr. Clarke is a large, intellectual-looking man, with heavy eyebrows 



THE SENATE AND THE HOUSE OF LORDS. 85 

and little beard. He was a pupil of Mr. Walter, the real architect of 
the dome and the Capitol extension. Mr. Walter's photograph hangs 
over Mr. Clarke's head, — a stout man of, say, sixty years of age, with 
a luxuriant head of white and gray hair, white beard all around his 
jaws, and a weary look, as of a man who had to climb a great deal, 
and was too fat for it. He and Mr. Clarke are both Philadelphians ; 
but Mr. Walter retired, satisfied that his work was in the best of 
hands ; and Mr. Clarke, having built the new library and carried out 
all the designs of his predecessors, is engaged in the conscientious 
work of making the Capitol building a more harmonious edifice. 

Here is the Capitol as Mr. Walter found it : A building of free- 
stone, painted white, supporting three wooden domes, all the cost of 
which had been under two millions of dollars. It was three hundred 
and fifty-two feet long, and one hundred and twenty-two feet deep. 

Here is what Mr. Walter did : He built a dome of iron on top of 
the old freestone Capitol, and a marble wing against each end of it. 
The dome cost about one million one hundred thousand dollars, and 
the wings cost six million five hundred thousand dollars. To make the 
old Capitol proportion itself well to the additions, short corridors 
connected it with the wings. 

Here is what Mr. Clarke has done : Finished up the designs of Mr. 
Walter, completed the dome, worked out of the inside of the old Cap- 
itol a noble library, suggested and superintended all manner of details, 
as statuary, ventilation, heating, rectifying old mistakes, and teaching 
taste and harmony. 

And this is what Mr. Clarke wants Congress to do : Move the front 
of the old freestone Capitol forward, and rebuild it of marble ; put the 
present front on the rear of the Capitol ; extend the park of the Capi- 
tol so as to make it eligible for drives, and reform the architecture of 
the interior of the dome, which is now a monotonous succession of 
orders, so as to make two entablatures only, and not three. To re- 
build the central freestone building will cost two millions of dollars, 
and to buy the land for the enlarged park will cost one million two 
hundred thousand dollars. 

This Capitol, standing in a wide, vacant, lofty area of new lots and 
green parks, is surpassed by but one legislative palace in the world, 
— the Houses of Parliament, at Westminster, London.* These make 

* The Parliament House at Melbourne, Australia, is four hundred and fifty feet long, two 
hundred and twenty feet wide, and seventy-four feet high. The style of architecture is Ro- 
man Doric, and thev, building is surmounted by a tower and cupola upwards of two hundred 



86 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

one grand mass of Gothic buildings, situated upon a flat plain on the 
brink of the River Thames, so low that the river often overflowed the 
Parliament entrances in former times. 

This mass of buildings covers nearly eight acres, or four acres and 
a half more than the Capitol covers. Its length is nine hundred and 
forty feet, its width about half as much, and the height of its tallest 
tower is three hundred and forty feet, or fifty-three feet higher above 
tiie ground than the dome at Washington. It contains over one hun- 
dred staircases, eleven hundred apartments, and more than two miles 
of corridors. Sixteen miles of steam-pipes heat it ; four hundred and 
fifty statues already adorn it, and there are spaces for more than two 
hundred more. The plan of it was selected from ninety-seven com- 
peting designs. The architect was made a baronet. He was twenty- 
one years at work upon it, and it cost three times his original estimate, 
or, ultimately, about ten millions of dollars, in gold. This sum is 
about equal, all things considered, to the cost of the Capitol of the 
United States, which is proof that public works in England are more 
conscientiously and more cheaply built than in America. The Par- 
liament Houses would have cost us from twenty to thirty millions, 
as we should have had to use depreciated currency, dear labor, and to 
have made of the work a political " job." The new court-houses in 
New York are said to have cost nearly as much as the vast Houses of 
Parliament. I have made a statement of these details merely to pre- 
pare the mind of the reader for a more consecutive description of this 
grand palace of Westminster. 

If one will descend the hill of St. Paul's Cathedral, whence we 
have already obtained a general view of London, and continue west- 
ward along Fleet Street, he will pass under Temple Bar, or arch, af- 
ter a walk of twenty minutes, and the same Fleet Street prolonged 
before him will take the name of " The Strand." Twenty minutes' 
walk further will bring him to the end of the Strand, at an open 
square, full of statues, and faced with fine hotels, and here, one of the 

foot high. There are two legislative chambers, seventy-two feet long by forty wide; a 
library forty feet square; two reading-rooms, and two restaurants, each of the four being 
fifty by twenty- five feet. 

Tho Parliament House at Ottawa, Canada, is to cost half a million dollars in gold. The 
stylo is Italian Gothic The building is to be five hundred feet long, and to support a 
tower one hundred and eighty feet high. The two legislative halls are eighty-two by forty- 
fivo feet. The building is rendered imposing by being placed on the bold bluff of tho Ottawa 
Rivor, one hundred and fifty feet above tho water. [See, further, the chapter on " Canada 
and Australia."] 

The above are tho chief legislative palaces of tho British colonies. 



THE SENATE AND THE HOUSE OF LORDS. 87 

underground railways of London has established its principal depot. 
The spot of confluence is called Charing Cross, and it is, except only 
London Bridge, the spot of densest confluence in London or the 
world. 

At Charing Cross the streets break up and radiate. Go to the 
rio-ht by the first street and you enter St. Giles, the abandoned quar- 
ter of the " West End," in ten minutes. Or go to the right by the 
second street, and in five minutes you are in the Haymarket, the street 
of night-walkers and the region of theatres. Or go straight on, across 
the square, and in ten minutes you are in Pall Mall and St. James, 
the quarter of gentlemen's clubs and noblemen's palaces. But turn 
to the left, by the broad street called- Whitehall, and in ten minutes 
you are at Westminster. 

Whitehall, like all the streets we have pursued since quitting St. 
Paul's, follows the windings of the Thames River, and is within rifle- 
shot of it. 

Immediately on entering Whitehall one sees that the buildings 
grow large and imposing. Soldiers, sentinels, mounted couriers, and 
numerous policemen appear. To the right of this wide street are 
the offices of the navy, the army, the treasury, the foreign secre- 
tary, and those other offices that we call in Washington by the gen- 
eral name of " The Departments." Behind these stretches the series 
of green parks, with the palaces on their further borders. To the 
left are the police headquarters, — w r hose chief officer is a baronet, 
— and a colossal fragment of the ancient palace of Whitehall, where 
Wolsey and Elizabeth dwelt, and where Charles I. was beheaded ; 
the republicans who condemned the latter to die were hanged, drawn, 
and quartered at Charing Cross behind us. 

It is these objects which revive to us the past bloody and memo- 
rable associations of English history, and while yet in the glow of 
their remembrance, we have come to the end of Whitehall ; the River 
Thames is close to the left of us, crossed by a magnificent bridge, 
and right before us, separated by an open piece of ground called 
Palace Yard, are Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament. 
Here, for nearly a thousand years, the Kings of England have been 
crowned, the royal court has been pitched, Parliament and State 
trials been held, and the enemies or victims of kings have been pil- 
loried and executed. 

To the right stands the glorious Abbey Church, the oldest associ- 
ation of the spot, where, to this day, the House of Lords worships on 



88 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

occasions of thanksgiving. Built in front of it, so that there is but 
a narrow graveyard between, is the Church of St. Margaret, where 
the House of Commons worships on similar days of rejoicing. 

To the left, across the Palace Yard, is Westminster Hall, dating 
back to the year 1087 ; it stands on the spot of burial of Edward 
the Confessor, one of the last Saxon kings, at whose grave William, 
the Norman Conqueror, was crowned King of England, and William 
Rufus, the Conqueror's son, built this grand old hall, which is to-day 
the vestibule of the Houses of Parliament. 

The Abbey is a Gothic cathedral of blackened gray stone, whose 
two great towers and front face across the parks, to the Queen's 
Palace. Its rear or choir is toward Parliament, with gloomy clois- 
ters and carved chapels attached thereto, like a garden and outhouses 
to a dwelling. St. Margaret's Church is newer, but it carries its 
spire with no more straightness than the old buttresses and pinnacles 
which swarm around the cathedral. 

The Palace Yard, between, is a cab-stand for the carriages of 
members merely, but before this book shall become old, it will be 
beautified and enclosed most probably ; so will the Capitol at Wash- 
ington be cleared of its common surrounding buildings, and made to 
exhibit itself more grandly. 

But the Palace and the Abbey can never rise out of the ground 
like our marble Capitol, which is placed upon a hill, like the Acropolis 
at Athens, or the Capitol at Rome. The Parliament Houses afford 
no one grand view from any side. They lie below the level of the 
surrounding streets. The approaches to the bridge of Westminster 
are lifted above their lower windows. From the Thames bank, op- 
posite, there is an unbroken view of the river facade, but there the 
Abbey is almost out of sight. From the parks, the confused towers 
of Abbey and Palace show imposingly, but the body of both build- 
ings is lost. From Whitehall we cannot see the Abbey plainly, for 
the intervening Church of St. Margaret, and we observe only one 
end of the Palace. The fourth side is yet more buried in blocks of 
common houses, inhabited in many cases by needy or base persons. 
In short, Westminster Palace (the proper name of the " Houses of 
Parliament") is built upon its present site out of respect to the 
ancient traditions thereof, with the characteristic respect of Eng- 
lishmen ; but the situation is obscure and bad on all accounts of 
solid foundations, picturcsqueness, and health. The sewer of the 
Thames, beneath its windows, emits foul odors and dangerous vapors. 






THE SENATE AND THE HOUSE OF LORDS. 89 

The graveyard of St. Margaret, close by, is said to breed disease, A 
bed of concrete, twelve feet thick, had to be laid, before the architect 
dared proceed with his work, and the coffer dam and river wall alone 
required nearly three years to complete them. The foundations of 
Washington Capitol, on the contrary, were laid by nature, durably 
and imposingly, and the dome of the Capitol is thirty-seven feet 
higher above tide water, therefore, than the tallest tower of West- 
minster. 

These natural defects omitted, the Houses of * Parliament, which 
are new as the newest parts of the American Capitol , constitute the 
largest building which has been erected in England for many centu- 
ries. Excepting Milan Cathedral, and perhaps a few other Gothic 
churches, it is the most elaborately ornamented building of the 
Christian era. It is built of magnesian limestone, brought from York- 
shire, the color of which is somewhat like that of the New York brown- 
stone, and this is supported upon river terraces of granite. The in- 
terior is of Caen stone from France, and of fine brick, and the trusses 
and girders are of iron. The style of architecture is Gothic, of that 
variety called Tudor, favorite three hundred years ago ; and fretwork, 
gilding, pinnacles, and statuary are profusely embroidered upon the 
entire palace. Upon this English Gothic are engrafted studies from 
the famous city halls and civil edifices of Belgium and Flanders, such 
as the belfries and hotels de ville of Antwerp and Brussels, Lille and 
Bruges. If from some lofty place one could look down upon the 
whole edifice at one view, he would see that it is a vast, irregularly 
oblong building, broken by pinnacles, bays, and buttresses throughout 
its long outline. From the centre rises a dome surmounted by an 
open stone Gothic lantern and spire, reaching the heighth of three 
hundred feet. At each end are unlike towers, besides, — one eight 
feet square and three hundred and fifty feet high ; the other forty 
feet square and three hundred and twenty feet high. The long river 
front is further ornamented with a pair of wing-towers at each end, 
— the two pairs, seven hundred feet apart, — almost the whole length 
of the American Capitol, — and each of these wing-towers has crested 
roofs, open-winged pinnacles, and gilded vanes, most exquisitely 
wrought. 

Remembering all this, we shall presently be able to go on with per- 
spicuity. A vast Gothic parallelogram, with a dome and spire in 
the centre and a tower at each end, — this is the situation on the land 

side. A similar parallelogram, with a dome and spire in the middle 
12 



90 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

and two towers at each end,— this is the view on the water side. Now, 
what is remarkable about those two towers on the side of the land, 
is this : the nearer and more slender one is the clock tower, with a 
huge clock in the swollen top of it. This clock shows four illuminated 
dials, each thirty feet in diameter; it chimes the quarters, and 
strikes the hours, on a bell weighing eight tons. The farther and 
greater tower is the largest square Gothic tower in the world. It 
weighs twenty-eight thousand tons ; the dome of the Capitol but four 
thousand ; the Victoria tower is ascended by four hundred and sev- 
enty-two steps. The architect, Sir Charles Bany, would not allow it 
to be built up at a greater speed than thirty feet a year, for fear of 
settling. In the front of this tower is an arch sixtj'-five feet high, 
in which the great state carriages of the Queen and her suite are 
driven. This tower is the principal marvel of the building, and it 
is called in honor of the Queen. The clock tower rises up from the 
side of the approaches to Westminster Bridge, and if you will stajid 
by that tower and strive to look down the profile of the building, you 
will find the Victoria tower cut off from your view by a great old 
battlementecl hall, which has placed itself lengthwise along the front 
of the Palace, and parallel with it, as if striving to measure lengths. 
This old hall is of a different color and of a pattern less florid than 
the Palace. It is moved, so to speak, against the Palace, like a steam- 
tug against the side of a full-rigged ship, and at its head rise two 
strong towers of stone, while the rear or stern of it reaches just to 
the middle of the Palace. 

This is the ancient and spacious Hall of Westminster, built by 
King William Rufus, and celebrated for its exquisite carpentery. 
To retain it in his general pile of Westminster the architect has thus 
ingeniously swung it alongside the new Palace, and made it the prin- 
cipal entrance hall. 

The people enter Parliament Houses by walking into Westminster 
Hall from the end of the Palace, near the clock tower. This takes 
them for nearly three hundred feet down the face of the Palace. 
Then turning to the left, at what was formerly the foot of the hall, 
they penetrate the Palace proper to the area beneath the central dome. 

The Queen, on the contrary, always drives into the Palace under 
the Victoria tower, at the opposite end. There are no other notable 
public entrances. 

These are the more bulky outlines of the great building, but its 
details are intricate and rich with turrets, niches, figures of queens, 



THE SENATE AND THE HOUSE OF LORDS. 91 

kings, and statesmen, and exquisite pinnacles and bands of sculpture 
between the stories, illustrative of heraldry, seals, and arms. Every 
detail is wrought with nicety. The noble towers appear to 
lengthen themselves as we observe them, rising with the eye and the 
wonder of their measurer ; but the elaborate Palace is not the 
product of any of those ages when Gothic architecture was a revela- 
tion of the mind, and consonant with man's existing faith and art. 
It is a bran new imitation, successful and prodigious, but without 
memories or inspirations of its own. It shows the power of British 
science, but is in nothing besides the Britain of the century in which 
it was reared. It is a perfect rose, — in wax. The same can be said 
of the United States Capitol, but it will not be felt ; for the Greek 
architecture was akin to the Greek freedom, reviving which, the various 
peoples of the eighteenth century revolutionized, — ourselves the 
first. Every republicanized nation, as it shook off its fetters, returned 
to classical models for laws, heroes, and architectures. In Paris they 
built the Pantheon ; at Washington, the Capitol. 

While we look up at the blossoming outlines of this wonderful Pal- 
ace, the story of its site may be vividly called before us. This spot was 
a little island beside the Thames once, called Thorney Island. In 
the seventh century a small monastery was founded here. The later 
Saxon kings built a palace beside it. The Norman Conqueror, anx- 
ious to flatter the conquered and take advantage of all superstitions, 
was also crowned here, beside the good King Edward's tomb, on 
Christmas day. Here he gave thanks for his victory also. His suc- 
cessors continued to ornament the site, at the expense of the good 
citizens of London, who, said Henry III., sneeringly, " called them- 
selves barons on account of their wealth." Here the fabric of Par- 
liament was built up. In a nook of the Great Abbey Church the 
House of Commons sat for three hundred years. The great hall, 
now r vestibule of the new Parliament Houses, was meantime the 
rendezvous of the peers. The great courts of law were set up on 
this site. Here the captive King of France was received most royally* 
Here the barons in armor extorted privileges from the sovereign. 
Here direful anathemas were pronounced amidst the quenching of 
tapers. Here single combats were fought out in the sovereign's 
presence. Clerk of these works of Westminster was once Geoffrey 
Chaucer, the earliest of our great poets. After Agincourt, the victor 
came here in glorious state. Then the River Thames was the royal high- 
way, filled with barges, and traitors were sent hence to the Tower. 






92 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

In the yard of this Palace perished Raleigh. In the vaults of it 
waited Guido Fawkes, with match and gunpowder, and he also, with 
his co-conspirators, was hanged here. Here Charles I. was tried, and 
Cromwell inaugurated. Down to our own time all great state trials 
have been held here, not the least notable of which was that of War- 
ren Hastings, which occurred in the latter years of George Washing- 
ton's life, and was concluded four years after the ground was bought 
for Washington city. The year Mrs. John Adams moved into the 
unfinished White House, its first tenant, the Irish Parliament was 
here annexed to the English. The novel of " Barnaby Rudge," by 
Charles Dickens, will give one an interesting idea of the dreadful 
religious riots which raged round Parliament in the closing years of 
the American Revolution. The year before our second war with 
England broke out (1811), Percival, the Prime Minister, was mur- 
dered in Parliament. The year the Missouri compromise was passed, 
the King of England (Geo. IV.) was prosecuting his wife in West- 
minster Hall for divorce. The year Andrew Jackson was inaugurated 
President for the second time, slavery in the British Colonies was 
abolished here. The next year following, 1834, or twenty years after 
the British had burnt the Capitol at Washington, the Houses of Par- 
liament took fire and burnt to the ground. As a temporary Capitol 
(afterwards the Old Capitol Prison) was set up at Washington in 
one hundred days, so in one hundred and twenty-five days the British 
Parliament met in the restored ruins of their Palace. The oldest 
part of the present American Capitol, the centre, was completed in 
1825 ; twenty-five years afterward the wings were commenced ; in 
l<sf>G the new dome was commenced. In 1840 the corner-stone of 
Parliament Houses was laid. Neither Palace nor Capitol are yet 
entirely completed. 

Let us now enter the Houses of Parliament. Passing up a few 
steps we enter Westminster Hall, sixty-eight feet wide and forty-two 
feet high. The roof is splendidly carved in oak, and ornamented with 
many ro} r al devices. Formerly it was hung with guidons, standards, 
and battle ensigns. To repair this roof in 1820, — nearly five hun- 
dred years after its first construction, — old ships-of-war were broken 
up, and their stout and storied timber was employed. Statues of 
kings tlank this great hall, and when we have walked to its further 
end, two hundred and thirty-nine feet, we mount a flight of steps, 
sixty-live feet in height, lighted by a grand Gothic window, of stained 
glass, forty-eight feet high by twenty-five feet wide. Turning to the 



THE SENATE AND THE HOUSE OF LORDS. 93 

left, we take a passage at right angles to the great hall behind us, 
ninety-five feet long, thirty feet wide, and fifty-six feet high. This 
splendid hall is all of one level ; it is decorated with frescoes, and 
marble statues of Hampden, Mansfield, Clarendon, and other states- 
men. 

This second hall, when we have traversed it, terminates in an 
octagon seventy feet square, which lies directly beneath the central 
dome and spire, that we have noticed without. From this octagon, 
which is at the centre of the Parliament Houses, corridors pass by the 
right to the House of Peers, and by the left to the House of Com- 
mons. Taking the passage to the right, we are in the lobby before 
the House of Peers. 

The peers' lobby is thirty-eight feet square ; four lofty arches open 
out of it, and the archway leading to the House of Lords is closed 
with gates of massive brass, which are eleven feet high, and weigh 
a ton and a half, and are richly decorated. 

The bronze doors leading to the United States House of Repre- 
sentatives are seventeen feet high. They weigh ten tons, and are 
altogether more remarkable than those of the House of Lords. 

The House of Lords' chamber is ninety-one feet long, forty-five 
feet broad, and forty-five feet high, almost an exact double cube. 
The United States Senate chamber is not so high by nine feet, but it 
is twenty-one feet longer and thirty-seven feet broader. The Senate 
chamber has a separate seat and desk for each senator, or less than 
a hundred places in all. These commodious desks are arranged in 
semi-circular fashion, so that all the senators face toward the Vice- 
President. The senate galleries will accommodate a thousand per- 
sons. The House of Lords, however, gives benches to two hundred 
and thirty-five peers, who face each other in rows lengthwise. The 
galleries in the House of Lords give place to few spectators, and that 
part of the chamber which, with us, is filled by the presiding officer 
and his clerks, is generally unoccupied, in the peers' chamber, for 
there stands the Queen's seat, the empty throne. The Senate cham- 
ber is surrounded by walls of a buff color ; the ceiling is of iron, 
handsomely embossed and gilded, and the only light afforded is 
through panes of enamelled glass in the roof. There are neither 
paintings nor statues in the Senate chamber. The House of Lords, 
on the contrary, is most gorgeously decorated. Six lofty windows, 
in painted glass, on either side, show full-length portraits of past 
kings and queens. Three archways, in either end, show fresco 



94 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

paintings of allegory, or English history. Between the windows and 
the arches, are canopied niches, whose pedestals are supported by 
angels, bearing shields, and in the niches stand the bronze effigies of 
those barons who forced the great charter from King John. The flat 
ceiling is magnificently charged with monograms, mitres, crozicrs, 
Shields, and heraldic symbols, and these are crossed by massive 
beams, gilded like solid gold, and all inscribed with mottoes of loyalty 
and religion. Busts, arms oi' bishops and peers, and infinite feudal 
cognizances, spangle the sides, borders, recesses, and ceilings. There 
is a reporter's gallery, and behind it a u strangers'," or spectators', 
gallery. At the opposite end from the throne is the bar, a sort 
oi' screen and railing at which counsel plead, and to which come mem- 
bers oi' the House of Commons. Next to the throne is the clerks' 
table. Nearer the body of the house are the crimson-colored wool- 
sacks, or cushions, of the officers of the House of Peers. The 
carpet on the lloor of this beautiful chamber is of a deep-blue ground, 
spangled with gold-colored Norman roses. The members' scats, 
reaching lengthwise, leave a fair open space at each end, and four 
superb brass candelabras light the area between, each seventeen feet 
high, and weighing twelve hundred pounds. 

The empty Royal Throne is always the object of the greatest atten- 
tion. It consists of a chair and footstool mounted upon a low plat- 
form, and covered with a triple canopy. The legs of the chair rest 
upon lions. The back of it is bordered with crystal and velvet, and 
surmounted by the lion and unicorn. Roses, thistles, shamrocks, 
and other devices are carved upon various parts of this seat, which 
stands upon a low platform covered with scarlet carpet, fringed with 
gold, and powdered with white roses and lilies. The Queen's footstool 
has carved sides, and a crimson velvet top, embroidered with roses 
and lilies. There are chairs near by, for the Prince of Wales and the 
sovereign's Consort, both splendidly gilded and carved. 

On either side oi' the throne, doors open into the Prince's chamber, 
a smaller apartment, ornamented with Tudor fireplaces, with paint- 
ings and with portraits ; and behind this chamber a royal gallery, one 
hundred and ten feet long, and forty-five feet wide, splendidly dec- 
orated with frescoes and stained glass, reaches back to the Queen's 
robing-room, near the Victoria tower. 

The number of peers differs somewhat every year, but it may be 
said to be at present in the neighborhood of four hundred and sixty, 
including minors. 



THE SENATE AND THE HOUSE OF LORDS. 95 

The following was the list in 1868 : — 

Princes of the blood royal 4 

Dukes 20 

Marquesses 18 

Earls 1G9 

Viscounts . 22 

Barons 215 

Peers of Scotland 1G 

Peers of Ireland 28 

English and Welsh Bishops 2G 

Irish Bishops 4 

Total 4G2 

Besides these the greater judges are generally summoned, to assist 
and advise the House of Lords. It will thus be seen that there are 
six times as many members of the House of Lords as of the United 
States Senate, but the number generally sitting bears about the 
same proportion to the House of Commons as do our senators to our 
representatives. The speaker of the House of Lords is called the 
Lord Chancellor, who is the custodian of the Queen's Great Seal, an 
important judge, and an officer of vast power and patronage. His 
salary is fift}^ thousand dollars a year ; he has an official residence, 
holds his office at the Queen's pleasure (which means as long as his 
party keeps in office), and he retires upon a pension of twenty-five 
thousand dollars a year. 

On the table before this " bewigged and begowned" Lord Chancel- 
lor, who sits uncomfortably balanced upon a crimson pillow-case, 
called the "woolsack/' are placed the mace and the seal-bag. The 
first is his presumed gavel, and the second contains the great seal. 
The mace is five feet long, silver gilt, elaborately chased and carved 
with a crown, orb, and cross. The seal-bag is of crimson silk, em- 
broidered in gold, fringed with gold bullion, tied by a silken cord, 
and inside of this bag the precious seal is further tied up in a leather 
pouch and a silk purse. The seal is merely a pair of silver dies, six 
inches in diameter and three quarters of an inch thick, in which 
melted wax is poured to take an impression of the device engraved 
there. The seal of Victoria represents that monarch, robed and 
crowned, on horseback, and on the reverse side the same good lady is 
enthroned between Justice and Religion. When the Queen comes to 
die this seal will be cut into four pieces and deposited in the Tower. 



96 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

They used to break up the great seal, and give fragments of it to the 
poor, perhaps " to cure the king's evil." 

The Lord Chancellor need not be a peer ; he is not addressed by those 
who claim the floor, but they address themselves to " My Lords ; " 
neither has he the right to decide who has the floor, nor the right to 
keep order. His office is costly, showy, and nondescript. 

The Queen appoints deputy speakers when the Lord Chancellor is 
absent or debating. 

The Chairman of Committees is a peer who presides in committee 
of the whole, and at some other times ; he is not a political officer, 
and is usually re-elected every session ; he gets twelve thousand five 
hundred dollars a year, and the counsel who assist him get seventy- 
five hundred dollars. 

The Clerk of the Parliaments gets twenty thousand dollars a year, 
a residence and a pension. He is appointed by the Queen, and his 
assistants are appointed by the Lord Chancellor. 

The Sergeant-at-Arms is the sheriff of the house ; he carries the 
mace before the Lord Chancellor, keeps order in the lobbies, and gets 
seventy-five hundred dollars a year. 

The foregoing officers correspond to the officers of the United 
States Senate. The Lord Chancellor resembles our Vice-President, 
but gets forty-two thousand dollars more salary than the latter. The 
Senate has also a Secretary, an Executive Secretary, and a Sergeant- 
at-Arms ; but the House of Lords has another officer whose duties are 
mainly ceremonial ; he is called the Gentleman-Usher to the Black Rod. 
He is a Knight of the Garter. He ushers the Queen into Parliament. 
He carries messages to the House of Commons. Peers charged with 
crimes are committed to his custody. This officer is a sort of con- 
necting link between the sober business of Parliament and the fantas- 
tic artificiality of the court. 

As in the Senate chamber, the two political parties choose, of their 
own will, opposite sides, so in the House of Lords the long seats on 
the Lord Chancellor's right hand are occupied by the administration 
party, with its leaders on the front bench. On the Lord Chancellor's 
left, facing the administration party, sit the opposition. If there are 
neutrals, as is frequently the case, they take the cross benches in 
front of the Lord Chancellor. 

This is the House of Lords or Peers, — a body constituted to sup- 
port the rights of the crown, and having full powers in all legislation, 
except the voting of money. Its members can vote by proxy. All 



THE SENATE AND THE HOUSE OF LORDS. 97 

bills of amnesty and those affecting the rights of the. peerage, ema- 
nate from the crown and are introduced into this house. 

The House of Lords is the highest tribunal in the land ; it tries &&* 
appeals from the Court of Chancery and impeachments made in the 
House of Commons. When a grand jury indicts a peer, he is tried by 
his peers. 

The Queen never comes to Parliament except with solemn ceremony 
to open, adjourn, or dissolve it. A hundred and fifty years ago the 
sovereign was a frequent spectator. 

The sixteen Scotch peers w T ho sit in Parliament are elected every 
year by the eighty-four nobles w r ho constitute the peerage of Scot- 
land. 

There are over two hundred Irish peers, only twenty-eight of 
whom are representatives in the House of Lords. 

Those ceremonials and representative sittings of the House of 
Lords, of which we propose to give examples in the present chapter, 
will comprise : — 

First, the Queen's appearance in the House of Lords to open, pro- 
rogue, or dissolve Parliament. 

Second, a trial by the House of Lords, acting in its capacity of jury 
for the trial of a peer. 

Third, some characteristic points of debates in the House of 
Lords. \- 

Before we enter into these descriptions it is necessary to say that 
the two chambers of Lords and Commons comprise but a small part of 
the vast bulk of the Parliament Houses. These two chambers are 
conveniently near each other, but, besides them, there are eleven 
courts open to the sky, and eighteen official residences within the 
Parliament Palace limits. Libraries, committee and refreshment 
rooms, conference and reading rooms, are parts of this great build- 
ing ; telegraph offices connect Parliament with the clubs — w T here 
members commonly loiter out the evenings — with the city of 
London, with the Continent of Europe and with the Atlantic Cable. 
There is, however, an extensive part of the Palace, in the rear of the 
House of Lords, devoted entirely to the convenience of the Queen. 

In a former chapter the sovereign has been described as she pro- 
ceeds with her court to open Parliament in state. That description 
concluded with the Queen's entrance to the Victoria tower. 

The Victoria tower stands at that corner of the Parliament build- 
ings immediately opposite the public entrance we have made use of 
\? 



98 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

when passing into Westminster Hall. The Queen and her suite drive 
under the Victoria tower, and the Queen, descending, mounts by a 
grand stairway lined with statues of sovereigns to what is called her 
robing-room. Her carriage, meantime, passes on below to a large 
court-yard within the Palace, where it turns and comes back to the 
foot of the staircase under the Victoria tower, to await her descent. 

In the United States Capitol there is one small apartment, in the 
rear of the Senate, called the President's room, lined with vari-colored 
marbles, and excessively frescoed. The President is never seen in 
this room more than two or three times a year, when he comes at the 
close of a session to sign bills immediately upon their passage. 

The Queen, however, is an integral part of Parliament, and a large 
part of the Parliament Palace is devoted to her uses. The great 
square tower, which is so expensive and so majestic a part of the 
Palace, is merely a sort of triumphal arch under which she may pass, 
and nearly all the space between this tower and the rear of the House 
of Peers is taken up by her staircase, guard-room, robing-room, and 
gallery. When the queen has been escorted by her suite up the royal 
staircase, she passes through the "Norman porch," which is embel- 
lished with statues and paintings of the Norman sovereigns, to her 
robing-room, — a small but exquisite chamber painted with scenes 
from the legend of King Arthur and the court of chivalry. 

Here the queen is robed by her attendants, everything being con- 
venient in the way of accessories, — mirrors, toilet articles, whatever 
could fit out the most fastidious belle for a ball, — and, besides the 
garments in which she is arrayed, she is fitted with her crown, and 
the sceptre is placed in her hand. 

The two Houses of Parliament have, meantime, been three days 
organizing, taking oaths, etc., in anticipation of this event, and the 
House of Peers is now waiting for the Queen, while the House of Com- 
mons is waiting for the House of Peers. The peers are all in their 
robes ; the Lord Chancellor is ready with the Queen's speech, which 
she has got pretty nearly u by heart," meantime, as her prime minister 
wrote it for her ; the Gentleman-Usher to the Black Rod, with his rod 
in his hand, is itching to bow the way before the Queen to her throne. 
At last they are all ready ; cannons fire, outside ; the Queen moves 
on, with her richly clad household and grand officers behind her, the 
Black Hod scraping before ; and the splendid royal gallery, with its 
gilded ceiling, is crowded on both sides with peeresses and people of 
distinction, who have come to see the ceremony. The sovereign 



THE SENATE AND THE HOUSE OF LORDS. 99 

clears the long gallery, passes the vestibule called the "Prince's 
chamber, " and appears before Parliament. 

Here let us take up the scene, as continued from our second chap- 
ter, of Victoria's first opening of Parliament. We are indebted for 
much of it to Mr. James Grant, a celebrated Parliamentary reporter. 

So early as twelve o'clock, m., the interior of the House of Lords, 
on the day Victoria opened Parliament, was nearly filled by peeresses 
and their daughters ; by one o'clock it was quite fall ; and so great 
was the anxiety to obtain a view of the young Queen, just eighteen 
years of age, that even the gallery of the House of Lords was filled 
w r ith the female branches of aristocratic families by twelve o'clock, 
all, as in the body of the house, in full dress. Lady Mary Mon- 
tague has given a graphic description of the siege which a troop of 
duchesses, countesses, and other titled ladies, laid to the door of the 
gallery of the House of Lords, when, in her time, some interesting 
debate was expected, and how, when they found, after a ten hours' 
assault, the gallery was not to be taken by storm, they succeeded in 
effecting an entrance by stratagem. The ladies, in the present case, 
were not under the necessity of attempting an entrance into the gal- 
lery by sheer physical force, for they had, in most cases, procured a 
Lord Chamberlain's order of admission ; but several of them effected 
an entrance by the persuasive eloquence of their pretty and fascinat- 
ing faces, accompanied by a few honeyed words, which the officers 
could not resist. 

Similar persistent efforts on the part of the ladies are made to enter 
the Senate chamber when the President is inaugurated. On such 
occasions the Sergeant-at-Arms, acting under orders from the Vice- 
President, keeps the galleries and doors. 

" Some of the British peeresses, on the occasion we are describing, 
carried the joke still further, and actually took forcible possession of 
the front seat in the gallery, which is always specially and exclu- 
sively appropriated for the gentlemen of the press. This seat is 
capable, on an emergency, of containing, including a back form, 
about thirty persons, and 3'et, on this day, only three reporters were 
fortunate enough to obtain admission ; and even they, but for the 
accidental circumstance of having taken possession of their places 
the moment the door was thrown open, would also have been among 
the excluded. And what does the reader suppose would have been 
the consequence? Simply, that not a word of the important pro- 
ceedings in the House of Lords on the opening of Parliament by the 



100 THE NEW WORLD COMPABED WITH THE OLD. 

Queen, be}^ond a copy of the speech, which is always sent from the 
government offices to the newspapers, could have appeared in next 
day's papers. 

" The three reporters already referred to, when they saw the rush of 
the ladies to take possession of the unoccupied seats, felt, in the first 
instance, inexpressible surprise ; but, on recovering themselves, the 
predominant feeling in their minds was one of gratitude to their stars 
that they had been fortunate enough to possess themselves of their 
places. 

" There they sat," moans Mr. Grant, " for two long hours, amidst 
a large assemblage of the fairest of the fair, literally hidden from the 
sight of those who were lucky enough to get a peep into the house 
from the door, by a forest of waving plumes of feathers of the richest 
kind. By one o'clock the house had an appearance which, I am con- 
vinced, may be said with truth, it has seldom, if ever, presented before. 
The whole of the benches on the floor and the two side galleries were 
occupied by the female portion of the families of the peers, all attired 
in their costliest and most magnificent dresses. I will not attempt to 
describe the effect produced on the mind of the spectator by the daz- 
zling splendor of the jewelry they wore." 

The nearest approach we Americans can make to such a scene is 
grand opera night on the advent of some youthful new prima donna. 

All the ladies had to sit about two hours before the arrival of the 
Queen, and while there were no proceedings in the house ; and yet 
everything was quiet. Meantime opera-glasses were employed upon 
each other as liberally as we make use of them in our full-dress pub- 
lic assemblies. 

A little before two o'clock, a discharge of artillery announced that 
Her Majesty was on her way to Parliament. This made great flutter 
amongst the ladies, and some wished they were outside, while every- 
body outside wished they were in. 

A short time passed away, and the striking up of a band of music 
on the outside announced the near approach of Her Majesty. A few 
moments more elapsed, and the thrilling tones of the trumpet inti- 
mated that Queen Victoria, though as yet unseen, was proceeding 
along the passage to her robing-room, and would be in the midst of 
them presently. 

Here the ladies in the House of Lords indulged in lively anticipa- 
tion of the Queen's wardrobe. They were not left long in doubt, for 
after various noises in the rear of the throne, and a few seconds more 



THE SENATE AND THE HOUSE OF LORDS. 101 

of fluttering, Victoria entered the House. The peeresses and all 
present simultaneously rose. The young girl Queen, laden with 
jewels and precious garments, bowed in by the usher, according to 
his best knowledge of " deportment," and followed by the nobility 
of her court, climbed fair and blushing up the steps of the throne. 
Her Majesty, having taken her seat on the throne, desired the peers 
to be seated. The intimation was known to be equally meant for the 
ladies. The Commons were then summoned into the royal presence. 

In the interval before their coming, the brilliant audience scanned 
the Queen's childish face and slender figure with mingled respect 
and criticism. She had been tutored to keep her self-possession, but 
maidenhood was sensitive beyond roj^alty, and by the rules of 
etiquette none dared approach to soothe her or to relieve her, and as 
yet she had no husband whose near presence and sympathy she could 
feel. 

Very soon, however, the wild buffaloes of the House of Commons 
were heard approaching. 

No sooner had the door been opened, in obedience to the mandate 
of the Queen, which leads into the passage through which they 
had to pass, on their way to the bar of the House of Lords, than you 
heard a patting of feet as if it had been of the hoofs of some two or 
three score of quadrupeds. "This, however," says one present, "was 
only one of the classes of sounds which broke on the ears of all in 
the House of Lords, and even of those who were standing in the 
ro} T al passages leading to it. There were loud exclamations of 
1 Ah ! ah ! ' and a stentorian utterance of other sounds, which 
denoted that the parties from whom they proceeded had been sud- 
denly subjected to some painful visitation. All eyes, not even 
excepting the eyes of Her Majesty, were instantly turned towards 
the door of the passage whence the sounds proceeded. Out rushed, 
towards the bar of the House of Lords, a torrent of members of the 
lower house, just as if the place they had quitted had been on fire, 
and they had been escaping for their lives. The cause of the strange, 
if not alarming, sounds, which had been heard a moment or two be- 
fore, was now sufficiently intelligible to all. They arose, from what 
Mr. O'Connell would call, the mighty struggle among the members, 
as to who should reach the House of Lords first, and by that means 
get nearest to the bar, and thereby obtain the best place for seeing 
and hearing. In this mortal competition for a good place, the honor- 
able gentlemen exhibited as little regard for each other's persons as 



102 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

if they had been the principal performers in some exhibition of physi- 
cal energy in Donnybrook Fair. They squeezed each other, jammed 
each other, and trod on each other's gouty toes. 

" The most serious sufferer, so far as I have been able to learn," 
adds Mr. Grant, " was one of the honorable members, who had his 
shoulder dislocated in the violent competition to be first at the bar. 
Even after the M. P.'s were fairly in the presence of their sovereign, 
there was a great deal of jostling and jamming of each other, which 
extorted sundry exclamations indicative of pain, though such ex- 
clamations were less loud than those before alluded to. The Irish 
members played the most prominent part in this unseemly exhibi- 
tion, and next to them the English ultra radicals ; the tories cut but 
a sorry figure in the jostling match. The liberals were, as the say- 
ing is, ' too many for them/ I thought with myself, at the time, 
what must the foreign ambassadors and their ladies, who were pres- 
ent, think of English manners, should they, unhappily, form their 
notions on the subject from the conduct, on this occasion, of the 
legislators in the lower house ? It was a rather awkward exhibition 
for a bod} r of men arrogating to themselves the character of being 
c the first assembly of gentlemen in Europe.' " 

Her Majesty having taken the oath against popery, which she did, 
in a slow and serious, yet audible manner, proceeded to read the royal 
speech, which was handed to her by the Lord Chancellor, kneeling on 
one knee. The most perfect stillness reigned through the place 
while Her Majesty was reading her speech. 

The speech being ended, Victoria descended from the throne, and 
with slow and graceful steps retired from the House to her robing- 
room, a few yards distant, nodding, as she did on her entrance, to 
most of the peeresses as she passed. 

In a few moments, by the cheers outside, it was known that she 
was returning to her palace, and her route was marked by the same 
affectionate testimonials as before. 

On the conclusion of the Queen's speech, both Houses adjourned, 
as is usual on such occasions, till five o'clock, when they again met 
to discuss the royal oration, and to consider the propriety of voting 
an address to Her Majesty, expressive of the gratitude of the Legis- 
lature for her most gracious speech. 

In both Houses there was a large attendance of members, while 
the galleries were crowded with strangers. 

In proceeding along the passage which leads to the reporter's 



THE SENATE AND THE HOUSE OF LORDS. 103 

gallery in either House, immediately previous to the commencement 
of the debate, it was an interesting sight to witness the reporters of 
the evening newspapers, with a number of bo}^s all ready to be 
despatched to their several offices, with the copy in piecemeal so 
soon as prepared, sitting at a table, with the necessary apparatus 
of pen, ink, and paper before them, and each more eager than the 
other to give a practical proof of the accuracy and expedition. 

Divest this scene of its stars, garters, insignias, and extravagant 
ceremony, and it will be seen to resemble very much any ordinary 
state pageant in the United States. Here, however, women cannot 
be eligible to office at the present time, whereas, in the English gov- 
ernment, a woman stands at the pinnacle of the edifice of state. 

Similar scenes happen when the sovereign prorogues, or stops, 
Parliament for a stated time, and when she dissolves it, or com- 
mands its official life to cease. 

No Parliament can sit longer than seven years, nor more than six ( 
months after a sovereign's death. When a sovereign dies, Parliament 
must meet instantly, even if it be Sunday. The Queen cannot pro- 
rogue Parliament more than eighty days, although when they meet 
again she may again prorogue them. In 1867-68 was held the third 
session of the seventh Parliament of Victoria's reign. At the same 
time the forty-first Congress of the United States was in session. 

It frequently happens that Parliament is opened with no more 
dignity by the sovereign than we count our electoral votes in joint 
Senate and House. 

I have fallen upon a very humorous instance of the manner in 
which William IV. appeared, reading the royal speech prepared for him 
by the politicians. He was Victoria's uncle. The day the King 
opened Parliament was unusually gloomy, which, added to an imper- 
fection in his visual organs consequent on advanced years and to 
the darkness of the old House of Lords, especially in the place 
where the throne is situated, rendered it impossible for him to read 
the royal speech with facility. Most patiently and good-naturedly 
did he struggle with the task, often hesitating, sometimes mistaking, 
and at others correcting himself. On one occasion he stuck alto- 
gether, when, after two or three ineffectual efforts to make out the 
word, he was obliged to give it up, when, turning to Lord Melbourne, 
the Prime Minister, who stood on his right hand, and looking him 
most significantly in the face, he said, in tone sufficiently loud to be 
audible in all parts of the House, " Eh ! what is it?" " The infinite 



104 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

good-nature and bluntness with which the question was put," says a 
looker-on, " would have reconciled the most inveterate republican to 
monarch}- in England so long as it is embodied in the person of 
William the Fourth." Lord Melbourne having whispered the ob- 
structing word, the King proceeded to toil through the speech, but 
by the time he got to about the middle, the librarian brought him 
two wax tapers, on which he suddenly paused, and, raising his head, 
and looking at the Lords and Commons, he addressed them, on the 
spur of the moment, in a perfectly distinct voice, and without the 
least embarrassment, or the mistake of a single word, in these 
terms : — 

"My Lords and Gentlemen,— 

" I have hitherto not been able, from want of light, to read this speech in 
the way its importance deserves ; but, as lights are now brought me, I will 
read it again from the commencement, and in a way which, I trust, will com- 
mand your attention." 

He then again, though evidently fatigued by the difficulty of read- 
ing in the first instance, began at the beginning, and read through 
the speech in a manner which w r ould have done credit to any profes- 
sor of elocution, — though it was clear he labored under a slight 
hoarseness, caused most probably by cold. The sparkling of the 
diamonds in the crown, owing to the reflection caused by the lighted 
candles, had a fine effect. Probably this was the first occasion on 
which a King of England ever read his speech by candle-light, at the 
opening of his Parliament. 

This sovereign was Victoria's predecessor on the throne, and during 
his reign the celebrated " Reform Bill" was passed, which the House 
of Lords so strenuously opposed that a creation of new peers in mass 
was threatened. The King was largely controlled by the Lords' party 
in the crisis, but he was obliged to yield at last, and I shall instance 
the sort of debate that preceded his appearance, to demonstrate that the 
House of Peers is frequently coarser and more boisterous than our 
Senate. 

"Their Lordships," says the newspaper report, "met at three o'clock. 
The House was crowded in every part. The Lord Chancellor having, 
as was understood, left the woolsack for the purpose of receiving 
His Majesty, Queen Victoria's uncle, whose arrival had been an- 
nounced by the firing of the Park guns, and the cheers of the multi- 
tude assembled outside the House. The King had come to dis- 
solve Parliament. 






THE SENATE AND THE HOUSE OF LORDS. 105 

" The Earl of Mansfield rose and said : I move that the Earl of 
Shaftesbury do take the chair pro tempore, 

" The Earl of Shaftesbury took his seat on the woolsack. 

" Lord Wharncliffe : I believe there can be no doubt in your Lord- 
ships' rnind as to the purpose for which we have this day met 

" The Duke of Richmond rose amidst the greatest confusion : I 
rise to order. Some noble Lords are not in their places. I move the 
standing order of the House, that they do take their places. 

"A noble Lord: I dissent from the suggestion of the noble 
Duke. 

" The Duke of Richmond : I maintain it is a standing order of 
the House that the noble Lords take their proper places on such an 
occasion as the present, and if that order be not complied with, I 
will move another standing order, c That persons not members of 
the House be ordered to withdraw/ 

" The scene of confusion which here ensued defies description. A 
number of peers, in all parts of the House, were calling out, ' Order ! 
order ! ' at the full stretch of their voices, while the peeresses who 
were present, — of whom there were many in full dress, — were 
greatly alarmed. In the midst of the scene a noble Lord, supposed 
to be Lord Lyndhurst, made some observations which were not 
heard. 

" The Duke of Richmond : I have to complain of the use of such 
language as that which has just fallen from the noble Lord ; and I 
shall move that the standing order against offensive language be 
read. [Renewed uproar, which it is impossible to describe.] 

"When it had somewhat subsided, the Marquis of Londonderry's 
voice was heard. He spoke in a very loud tone, and exhibited the 
utmost violence of manner. He said : I rise to order. I main- 
tain that I am in possession of the House. I rise to accuse the noble 
Duke of bringing forward a very unfounded charge. I am not aware 
of any offensive language being used on this side of the House which 
could provoke the remarks of the noble Duke. 

"The Marquis of Clanricarde : After what has fallen from the 
noble Marquis, it is most desirable that the noble Duke should per- 
sist in his motion for the observance of the standing orders of the 
House. 

" The Marquis of Londonderry : I call on the noble Duke to men- 
tion any offensive language which has been used by the noble Baron 
(Lord Lyndhurst). It appears to me that the noble Duke begins to 
U 



106 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

think that he is to be the hero of the coup d'etat on this occasion, 
and that he fancies he can smother that feeling which is essential to 
the expression of the sentiments of noble Lords on this most extraor- 
dinary meeting. It appears to me that the noble Duke is endeav- 
oring to set aside the right of peers to declare their sentiments, by 
having recourse to so miserable an expedient as that of moving the 
standing orders of the House. The cries of ' Order ! order ! ' which 
now resounded through the House were deafening. They were 
mingled with shouts of c Order of the day ! ' during which, Lord 
Wharncliffe rose and said : Without wishing to provoke a discus- 
sion on the subject, I am anxious that it shall be entered on the jour- 
nals of the House, that I, in my place yesterday, did give notice that 
I would move an humble Address to His Majesty, not to exercise his 
undoubted prerogative of dissolving Parliament. I now beg leave 
to read the address to your Lordships. 

" The noble Lord here read the address, which was to the effect, that 
it appeared to the House that under the extraordinary circumstances 
in which the country was placed, and the excitement then existing 
in the public mind, a prorogation or dissolution of Parliament was 
likely to be attended with the most disastrous consequences. (Loud 
cries of "Hear! hear ! " from the tory benches.) The Lord Chan- 
cellor at this moment entered the House, and addressed their Lord- 
ships in the most emphatic manner in the following terms : * My 
Lords, I have never yet heard it doubted that the King possesses 
the prerogative of dissolving Parliament at pleasure ; still less have 
I ever known a doubt to exist on the subject at a moment when the 
lower house has thought fit to refuse the supplies.' 

" Here there were tumultuous cries of ' Hear ! hear ! ' mingled with 
shouts of ' The King ! the King ! ■ and tremendous uproar. 

" The Lord Chancellor having retired from the House to receive His 
Majesty, confusion reigned. The Marquis of Londonderry called 
on Lord Shaftesbury to take the chair. [Cries of ' Order ! order ! * 
' Lord Shaftesbury ! ' ' Shame ! shame ! ' 'The King ! ' and the great- 
est uproar.] 

" The Earl of Shaftesbury having taken his seat on the wool- 
sack, a scene of confusion ensued, of which it were impossible 
for words to convey any idea. When it had partially subsided, 
the Marquia of Londonderry rose, with much warmth of tone and 
violence of gesture, and said, 'As long as I hold a seat in this 
House, 1 will never consent to — ' [The uproar was here renewed 



THE SENATE AND THE HOUSE OF LORDS. 107 

with such tremendous violence as to prevent the noble Marquis from 
proceeding further.] It having again partially subsided, the Earl 
of Mansfield rose, and said, ' My Lords, such a scene as this I 
never before witnessed in your Lordships' house, and hope I never 
shall see anything like it again. I have heard from the noble and 
learned Lord on the woolsack, with the utmost surprise, that it is the 
undoubted right of the crown to dissolve Parliament when the House 
of Commons refuses the supplies. The noble and learned Lord had 
indeed, perhaps, with wilful ignorance, declared this to be the fact. 
I will use no intemperate language, but I will nevertheless assert, as 
far as God Almighty has given me the means of understanding, that 
the crown and the country are now about to be placed in a most 
awful predicament, unparalleled at any previous period.' 

" The noble Earl was proceeding in somewhat the same strain, when 
loud cries of ' The King ! the King ! ' announced the approach of His 
Majesty, who, on entering, immediately mounted the throne with a 
firm step, and, begging their lordships to be seated, he, after one or 
two forms had been gone through, delivered his speech dissolving the 
Parliament." 

The " Times" account of this extraordinary affair concludes 
thus: "It is utterly impossible to describe the scene that pre- 
sented itself in the House from the commencement of the proceed- 
ings up to the very moment of His Majestj-'s entrance. The violent 
tones and gestures of noble Lords ; the excitement, breaking down 
the constitutional usages, not to say civilities, of life, astonished the 
spectators, and affected the ladies who were present with visible 
alarm. In a word, nothing like this scene was ever before witnessed 
within the walls of Parliament." 

There are several striking examples of trials of peers by the House 
of Lords, but I have selected, to illustrate this function of the 
superior House of Parliament, the trial of Lord Kingsborough for 
the murder of Henry Gerald Fitzgerald. The latter was a natural 
son, and a man of bad passions. He seduced the former's daughter, 
his own cousin, and, after being exposed, again attempted to decoy 
her from her father's house. In this attempt he was discovered, and 
while engaged in a deadly struggle with her brother, Lord Kings- 
borough shot him dead. This case fills many interesting pages of such 
books as the "Romances of the Aristocracy," and "Tales of Noble 
Families," — a class of books very popular with British females of high 



108 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD 

and low degree. The parties were Irish, but the " stage business," 
as one denominates it, is precisely the same nowadays. 

It is from the enterprising annalist, Burke, that I derive this 
sketch. 

It was on the eighteenth of May, 1798, the year before Washing- 
ton died, that the trial took place in the House of Lords. Much 
interest was excited by the affair, as, since the case of Lord Byron, 
in England, nothing of the kind had been known. It was a tragedy 
new alike to the actors and the audience, and the imaginations of 
either were proportionably raised beyond the level of ordinary occa- 
sions. The usual place of meeting, a small though handsome cham- 
ber, being too confined for the business on hand, the peers marched 
in grand procession into the House of Commons. First came the 
Masters in Chancery, with the robed judges of the inferior courts ; 
next came the minor orders of nobility not entitled to vote, and the 
eldest sons of peers ; lastly, the peers themselves advanced, two by 
two, all save John Fitzgibbon, the first Earl of Clare, who walked, in 
solitary dignity, without a companion. " We will not," says Burke, 
u dwell upon the bowings and the bendings employed by the various 
subordinates in the preliminary discharge of their duties, neither will 
we stop to recount all the crossings to the right and to the left, and 
the reverences to His Grace, the Lord High Steward, on the wool- 
sack. If they occupied much time, and to little purpose, we will not 
commit the same error by repeating them. It is enough for the 
present purpose to have noticed that such was the case." 

When these ceremonies had been gone through, the royal commis- 
sion was read aloud, appointing the Earl of Clare, Lord High Stew- 
ard, all the peers standing up the while with their heads uncovered. 
To this succeeded the reading of the writ of certiorari, with the 
return to it, the indictment before the grand jury, and the finding of 
a true bill by Boyle and Fellowes. Finally, the Clerk of the Crown 
called upon the Sergeant-at-Arms to do his dut}^, whereupon the lat- 
ter came forward and cried: " Oyez ! oyez ! oyez ! Constable of 
Dublin Castle, bring forth Robert, Earl of Kingston, your prisoner, 
to the bar, pursuant to the order of the House of Lords. God save 
the King ! " 

A profound silence followed this summons, every eye and ear 
being stretched in anxious expectation of the prisoner. After a delay 
that seemed more than long enough to the excited audience, though 
it could not have lasted many seconds, the Earl was ushered in by 



THE SENATE AND THE HOUSE OF LOKDS. 109 

Constable and Deputy Constable of Dublin Castle, the latter being 
on his left hand, and carrying an axe, with the edge turned from him, 
in token that he had not as yet incurred the last fatal penalty of the 
law. He then bowed lowly to the High Steward, and again to 
the peers on either side, after which he knelt to the bar, — " a degree 
of humility," says the reverent Burke, " that might have become guilt 
when soliciting for mercy, but hardly seems appropriate to a man 
facing his judges in the bold consciousness of innocence." 

The degradation, however, if it really were such, was short-lived. 
He was directed by the High Steward to rise, whereupon he repeated 
the former ceremonial, which this time was acknowledged by all 
present, and Lord Clare thus addressed him from the woolsack : — 

" Robert, Earl of Kingston, you are brought here to answer one 
of the most serious charges that can be made against any man, — the 
murder of a fellow-subject. The solemnity and awful appearance of 
this judicature must naturally discompose and embarrass } r our Lord- 
ship. It may, therefore, not be improper for me to remind your Lord- 
ship that you are to be tried by the laws of a free country, framed for 
the protection and punishment of guilt alone ; and it must be a great 
consolation to you to reflect that you are to receive a trial before the 
supreme judicature of the nation ; that you are to be tried by your 
peers, upon whose unbiased judgment and candor you can have the 
firmest reliance, more particularly as they are to pass judgment upon 
you under the solemn and inviolable obligation of their honor. It 
will also be a consolation to you to know that the benignity of our 
law has distinguished the crime of homicide into different classes. 
If it arise from accident, from inevitable necessity, or without malice, 
it does not fall within the crime of murder ; and of these distinctions, 
warranted by evidence, you will be at liberty to take advantage. 
Before I conclude, I am commanded by the House to inform your 
Lordship, and all others who may have occasion to address the court 
during the trial, that the address must be to the Lords in general, and 
not to any Lord in particular." 

"This last remark, in all likelihood," says the same critic, " pro- 
ceeded from the general non-acquaintance with such proceedings, they 
having slept so long in abeyance." The Clerk of the Crown next 
commenced the usual interrogatories : — 

"How say you, Robert, Earl of Kingston, are you guilty, or not 
guilty, of this murder and felony for which you stand arraigned ? " 

" Not guilty," replied the noble prisoner. 



110 THE "NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

" How," resumed the clerk, " will your Lordship be tried?" 

" By God and my peers." 

" God send you a good deliverance ! " 

Proclamation was then made by the Sergeant-at-Arms : — 

u Oyez ! oyez ! all manner of persons who will evidence upon oath 
before our sovereign Lord, the King, against Robert, Earl of Kingston, 
the prisoner at the bar, let them come forth and they shall be heard, 
for he now stands at the bar upon his deliverance." 

To this appeal there was no answer, and, after a short delay, that the 
witnesses, if there were any, might have time to come forward, Lord 
Clare demanded of Curran, the counsel for the accused, whether due 
notices had been served of the removal of the indictment into the High 
Court of Parliament. This demand was met by evidence showing 
that such notices had been served on the widow and children of the 
deceased ; and again proclamation was made, requiring any witnesses 
for the crown to come forward with their testimony. None replying 
to this second summons, the peers in succession pronounced their 
verdict of " Not guilty, upon my honor ; " when Lord Clare informed 
the accused of his unanimous acquittal, upon which the latter made 
three low bows and retired. Not the least impressive part of this 
ceremony, if we look only to the imagination, was the symbolical 
form which now concluded it. The white staff being delivered to the 
High Steward, he held it in both hands, broke it asunder, and declared 
the commission was dissolved. 

It is this identical form of trial which is liable to be revived to-day. 
An instance of appeal lately made from the highest under tribunals 
to Parliament was that of Mrs. Yelverton, proceeding against her 
dishonorable husband, though " a gentleman" in the English sense. 
The peer commanded more mercy than the woman, and, to the dis- 
gust of the English Commons, the wife's plea was rejected. 

A notable example of condign punishment visited upon a peer was 
the case of Earl Ferrers, about a hundred years ago. He butchered 
his steward for rendering some testimony in favor of the Earl's di- 
vorced wife, and was condemned to be hanged and anatomized at 
Tyburn. He proceeded to the gallows in his wedding-suit, congratu- 
lating the people on the way that they were to see u a gentleman" 
die. Drunkenness and indecency, the usual accompaniments of an 
English execution, marked hangman and spectators, but the gentle- 
man was hanged with a silken cord. 

Frequently, at the trial of peers, swords have been drawn in the Hall 



THE SENATE AND THE HOUSE OF LORDS. HI 

of Westminster by retainers of the various contestants. This has not 
occurred for some years, and one of the last illustrations of the sort 
was the trial of Lord Gray, of Work, indicted for seducing Earl 
Berkley's daughter. The latter would not quit her paramour, and 
the Earl's friends put it to the arbitrament of cold steel. 

The history of England is fruitful in episodes of impeachment. We 
have had two or three such trials in the United States, and the latest 
of these is yet in the memory of the youngest reader. It was the 
arraignment of a President before the Senate on impeachment by a 
vote of the House of Representatives. The trial was long, dramatic, 
and futile, and, in a certain sense, reactionary upon its abettors. In 
like manner Warren Hastings, Governor-General of India, was tried 
on presentment of articles of impeachment for seven years, and he, 
also, was acquitted. 

When the House of Commons impeaches, a member rises, makes 
the motion, and offers his proofs. If the House concurs, this member, 
with several of his friends, goes up to the bar of the House of Lords, 
and impeaches the offender. The trial is held in Westminster Hall, 
the Lord High Steward presiding, and Commons attend in Committee 
of the Whole. The peers vote guilty or not guilty, " upon my 
honor ! " 

If guilty, the Speaker of the House of Commons demands judg- 
ment. Either the House of Commons can rescind, or the crown can 
pardon, after conviction. 

When the House of Lords " divides " on a vote, or passes through 
tellers, the division is ordered by the cry of " Not content ! " 

No motion in the Lords need be seconded. 

The "House of Lords is called M an estate." Sometimes it is con- 
sidered as two " estates," one being the lords spiritual, the other the 
lords temporal. Parliament, properly speaking, is composed of the 
crown, these two, and the Commons. We have fallen into a fashion 
of calling our House of Representatives " Congress," as the English 
often improperly call the House of Commons ''Parliament." 

A petition addressed to the peers must begin: " To the Right 
Honorable, the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, in Parliament as- 
sembled." 

The longest Parliament ever assembled was in 16G1, a. d., which 
existed more than sixteen years and a half, and one of the shortest 
was in 1830, which expired in less than six months. 

The House of Lords has exclusive jurisdiction in matters affecting 



112 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

the peerage. The Irish peers in it are elected for life by the body of 
the Irish nobility, and the sixteen Scotch peers are also elective. 

Three peers present constitute a quorum in the House of Lords. 
This house seldom holds sessions on Wednesdays or Saturdays, and 
it meets at five o'clock, p. m. If a peer gets in the rear of the Lord 
Chancellor's woolsack, he is not considered to be in the House of Lords, 
and cannot vote there. If a peer undergoes examination before a 
select committee of the lower house, he sits with his hat on. So jeal- 
ous are the peers of their own superior station that, although the law 
prescribes joint committees for the transaction of business between 
the two houses, no such committee has been appointed for a hundred 
years. No motion made in the Lords needs to be seconded. If sev- 
eral peers rise to speak together, the peers, and not the speaker, say 
who shall be heard. 

B} r right, the peers take specified seats, according to their relative 
dignity and the antiquity of their peerage ; but this is seldom insisted 
upon. Young noblemen on attaining majority take their places with- 
out paying fees or without ceremony, while newly created peers must 
pass both gauntlets. Peers and Commons alike sit with their hats on, 
after the manner of a Quaker meeting. 

Protestant and Catholic peers take different oaths. The Scotch 
peers show their certificates of election. Except the Princes of the 
blood and the Lord Chancellor the peers take the oath in bodies. 
Peers, with writs of summons, present their writs kneeling on one 
knee to the Lord Chancellor. The House of Lords is daily opened 
with prayers, after which strangers are admitted by ticket. When 
sitting as a court anybody can enter. 

In the United States, the President has the power of vetoing bills, 
returning them, with his objections, to the house in which they origi- 
nated. His assent is signified by merely taking up a quill and sign- 
ing them, and toward the close of a session he occupies a room in the 
Capitol building for the express purpose of signing bills as rapidly as 
they are passed. Or they need not be signed at all ; for if he neglect 
them for ten days they become laws. 

The Queen has, also, the veto power, but she dare not exercise it 
in the present state of English public opinion. The last refusal to 
sign a bill passed by Parliament occurred in the time of Queen Anne, 
1707. Victoria gives her royal assent either by special commissioners, 
or in person, robed, crowned, and seated on her throne in the House 






THE SENATE AND THE HOUSE OF LORDS. H3 

of Lords. The 1)111 is read by its title, and the assent is rendered for 
the Queen, by the Clerk of the Parliament, in Norman French : — 

" La Reyne le veult" [The Queen wills it.] 

To bills of supply he gives her answer : — 

" La Reyne remercie ses bons sujets, accepte leur benevolence, et ainsi 
le veult.' 7 [The Queen thanks her good subjects, accepts their kind- 
ness, and wills it."] 

A bill becomes an act immediately when the royal assent is ren- 
dered. 

The following chapters will take np in detail many functions of the 
peers performed jointly with other branches of the government. 

Such is the House of Peers, imperfectly portrayed, and the reader 
has been reminded of its likeness to the American Senate in many 
particulars. The Senate, indeed, in many of its traditions and par- 
liamentary laws is copied from the House of Lords. 

The Senate, like the House of Lords, never completely expires, but 
laps over from Congress to Congress, from administration to admin- 
istration. It is the conservative body, with less direct responsibility 
to the people than the lower house, and it is closely interwoven with 
both the executive and the legislative government. It appoints to 
office jointly with the President. It passes bills jointly with the 
House. Its President is generally the Vice-President, who goes up to 
the chief magistracy in certain contingencies. It is a court to try 
judges and presidents. As the House of Commons must come to the 
Chamber of Peers when the Queen opens Parliament, so does the 
House of Eepresentatives come up to the Senate when the President 
is inaugurated. The Senate is partly of Roman, and partly original, 
but chiefly of English, origin, created by the written constitution of 
the country, and set going nearly at the beginning. The House of 
Lords was the original Parliament of England, wrested from the ab- 
solute tyranny of the throne, and the House of Commons, in turn, was 
coerced from the Sovereign and the Lords. With us the people were 
first ; with the English the King was first. 

In the growth of time the latest body has become the most powerful 
of all, both in America and England, and the Senate and the House 
of Lords are at present the most honorable, and yet the most unpop- 
ular bodies in either government. In 1867 the House of Representa- 
tives consented to the passage of a Tenure-of-Office Bill, giving the 
Senate a veto power over the President's removals. This act vastly 
strengthened the Senate, yet led to troubles which perplexed the 
15 



114 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

state, and in the end raised in certain extreme minds a question 
identical with a mooted one in England, — whether the Senate and 
the House of Lords alike were not dangerous and irresponsible bodies. 
Bitter experience has taught the House of Lords to consent to such 
legislation as the Commons demands. The Senate in like manner 
generally gives way to popular will. If the House of Lords holds 
out, the only relief is to create enough new peers to outvote them. 
But we cannot create more senators except by admitting more States, 
and over this the Senate has joint legislation. The senators are 
elected b} r State legislatures, and in several cases where the latter 
bodies are demoralized, it is claimed that gross corruption enters 
into the choice. But, collectively, the United States Senate is the 
finest body of legislators in the world, physically, at least. In 1867 
they were of the average height of five feet ten and a half inches, 
and above the average weight of one hundred and seventy-one pounds. 
The English peers are also of dignified bearing, and frequently of hand- 
some presence. But the tendency of thought and indignation in 
England is no less against the aristocracy in its social and landed, 
than* in its legislative, relation. In every land rationally governed 
there must needs be a body midway between impulse and tyrann}', 
popular passion and absolute magistracy. But whether this body 
shall be hereditary, and invigorated by occasional accessions from 
the people, or indirectly elective, is the dilemma of English thinkers 
at the present day. Americans think that there can be but one con- 
clusion upon this question. What has preserved the British aristoc- 
racy is mainly this : that it is the most accessible and democratic 
aristocracy in history. Its abuses are from the past, its virtues are 
from the present. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE HOUSE OF COMMONS AND THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES. 

Comparison of their places of meeting, parliamentary laws and behavior, and rise and de- 
velopment in the state. — Individual exemplifications of their leaders and oratory. — Eng- 
land considered in her constituencies. ■ — The reform bills of 1832 and 1867. — Statement 
of the relative merits of the English and the American manner of representation. — 
Various scenes in the House of Commons. 

By this time we are well acquainted with the Houses of Parlia- 
ment. We see that the chambers of the Commons and the Peers 
occupy the same relation to each other architecturally, as the Senate 
Chamber and the Hall of Representatives at Washington. But those 
two chambers in the Parliament Houses are deeply buried in the core 
of the buildings, while in the American Capitol their counterparts 
occupy the body of the two large wings. 

Hidden in their vast Gothic palace these British chambers of legis- 
lation are no more than a couple of seeds in a melon. " The palace 
itself," as a reviewer says, " delights only those who see in it a stone 
embodiment of the British Constitution — the slow, irregular, but 
picturesque growth of ages." Others, like Lord Brougham, believe 
that it is " barbarous in the extreme to erect a Gothic structure for 
parliamentary purposes in the middle of the nineteenth century." 

Be this as it may, we have now but to return from the House of 
Lords along the main corridor which passes under the great central 
dome, and, crossing the lobby of the Commons, we enter the House 
or Chamber of Commons. The Speaker of the House in his chair and 
the Queen, when enthroned in the Lords, face each other four hundred 
and fifty feet apart, and midway between them is the Octagon. 

The Speaker of the House of Representatives, in like manner, faces 
the President of the Senate, and midway between them is the Rotunda. 
The Hall of Representatives is one hundred and thirty-nine feet long, 
ninety-three feet wide, and thirty feet high, and galleries running 
quite round it give seats to twelve hundred spectators. The shape 
of the hall is rectangular, and the Speaker sits on one of the wide 

115 



116 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

sides, facing the main door of entrance. His chair is placed upon a 
conspicuous platform ; a marble bar or table stands before him, and 
this is again enclosed by the marble bar of the clerks. As with the 
senators, each representative has a desk especially assigned to him, 
and a comfortable chair. In the fortieth Congress there were two 
hundred and thirty-two members. 

The Hall of the House of Commons is seventy-five feet long, forty- 
five feet wide, and fortr-one feet high, or only about half the size of 
the Hall of Representatives, with galleries on three sides. It is a 
rectangular chamber, but the Speaker sits on one of the short sides, 
or at the end, facing the main door of entrance. Over the head of 
the Speaker, as in the American Congress, is a reporters' gallery. 
Behind and above the reporters' gallery in the House of Commons, 
is a sort of bird cage, with wire gauze in front, and this is the only 
place which ladies are allowed to enter ; for by rule they are forbid- 
den in the House of Commons. There are places for only sixty 
" strangers" or spectators, and these can be vacated by the whim of 
any member' crying out : " Mr. Speaker, I see strangers in the 
House ! " The Speaker sits under a canop}^, carved with the royal 
arms, and he wears a white wig and a black gown. Before him is the 
clerk's table, whereon is placed the Speaker's mace, a weapon of so 
little real use as to deserve the name which Cromwell gave it of the 
" fool's bauble." The seats run lengthwise down the house, on each 
side of the Speaker's chair, and there are short cross-benches by the 
door. No member has a desk or table ; all sit as in church pews, 
with a pulpit in the middle, or, as I once heard a profane American 
say, "The arrangement of seats is like that of a pit for dog-fighting, 
open at the ends." There were six hundred and fifty-eight members 
in the House of Commons in 1868, but seats for only four hundred 
and twenty-eight. The average attendance is three hundred. The 
Chamber of Representatives at Washington is approached through 
the noble semi-circular hall of the older Capitol, with columns, sculp- 
ture, and light, worthy of a Roman Senate House. Out of this a 
short aisle, closed with massive and elaborate gates of bronze, leads 
to the light and airy lobby which completely encloses the new Hall 
of Representatives. Opening from this lobby are committee rooms, 
post offices and telegraph offices, and magnificent marble stairways, 
which lead to the lobbies and galleries above. That side' of the lobby 
which lies behind the Speaker's chair is the private lobby of the 
Speaker and members, and along it are the office rooms of the Speaker, 






HOUSES OF COMMONS AND OF REPRESENTATIVES. 117 

the Clerk, and the Sergeant-at-Arms. From this lobby two splendid 
bronze stairways descend to the committee rooms, restaurant, etc., in 
the basement. These lobbies have no official use, but are merely 
places for conversation or promenading. 

In the House of Commons, the two long lobbies on either side of the 
Speaker have actual uses, and they are called " division lobbies," 
that to the Speaker's right hand being for " ayes," that to the left 
for " noes." When a division is called for, to precisely ascertain 
the vote upon any question, the two political parties muster their 
members, and the House is filled. Two minutes only are allowed 
after the moving of a question for absentees to appear, and these are 
marked by a sand-glass, which the Speaker turns upside down. Then 
the door is closed, and he puts the question. 

" I think the ayes have it ! " he says, when they have voted orally. 
" No ! no ! " from the other side. 

" The ayes to the right, the noes to the left ! " he says. Then 
everybody leaves^ his seat, and goes out of the door to the right or to 
the left, according to his vote, the doors being cut through the long 
benches. Two tellers are appointed for each door, picked from both 
political parties. The members re-enter in single file, are counted 
by the tellers, and a clerk, in wig and gown, standing at a little box, 
takes the numbers. The four tellers then form abreast, and retire 
backward, bowing, while that teller whose party has won the vote 
takes the right-hand side. 

In the House of Representatives, when tellers are demanded, the 
members merely walk through a couple of tellers down the main 
aisle of the Hall, and return to their seats by the side aisles. 

The Hall of Representatives is even more elaborately ornamented 
than the Senate Chamber, and gilded overhead between the painted 
skylights. It contains, like the Senate, separate galleries for ladies, 
gentlemen, and the foreign diplomatic body. The House of Com- 
mons is much plainer than the House of Peers. It has twelve side 
windows, painted with the arms of boroughs ; the ceiling is flat, with 
the ends inclined, and the house is lighted by skylights, with gas 
jets above them. The floor is of perforated iron, covered with mats, 
and hot or cold air is admitted at will below. The benches are 
painted green, and the walls are panelled with oak. 

Take a meeting-house, and put half-a-dozen rows of benches 
lengthwise down it on each side, sloping up in gentle tiers, so as to 
leave the space in the middle open. In the centre of the open space 






118 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

put a table ; at the foot of the open space put a chair under a canopy, 
something like an old-fashioned bed. Cut an aisle across the long 
seats, paint the benches green, and grain the walls oak. Now, fill 
the seats with men, with their hats on, and put wigs and robes on the 
Speaker, and a few other officers, and a sword on the Sergeant-at- 
Arms. The general effect will be that of a Quaker meeting, sitting 
as a jury, with some Episcopalian bishops amongst them as judges. 
This is the House of Commons superficially. 

We have often made complaints of the acoustic properties and 
accommodations of our Halls of Congress, but Parliament has alto- 
gether the worst of the two bargains. The "British Almanac" for 
1869, says: — 

" When designing the Houses of Parliament, in all that enormous 
space room could only be found for something ^ess than two-thirds 
of the members of the House of Commons ; and the building, erected 
at a cost of millions, as the place of meeting of the Legislature, is 
actually so constructed, that no arrangements can be made for more 
than two-thirds of the working sections of it being present at the 
most important discussion. Even a prominent member of the minis- 
try stood, for hours, 6 unable to get a seat.' The peers have less 
difficulty to be seated than to be heard." It has been seriously pro- 
posed, indeed, that both bodies shall vacate the Palace of Par- 
liament, except on ceremonial occasions, and remove to separate 
buildings. 

In a severer .tone, a humorous reviewer in the a London Quarterly " 
for 1857, says : — 

" This, then, is the room in which laws are made for some one hun- 
dred and forty millions of people, and in which, through ages to come, 
in all human probability, laws will continue to be made for Britain and 

her dependencies The roof looks like the inside bottom of a 

huge barge. The chamber was, originally, far more handsome, but 
the principle of acoustics had not been studied, and opposition mem- 
bers were incessantly rising and attacking clauses which the govern- 
ment had struck out ten minutes before, while the supporters of the 
ministers were defying their antagonists to divide on amendments of 
which they had announced the withdrawal. It was felt that either 
the architectural beauty of the chamber must be sacrificed, or panto- 
mime and the speaking-trumpet must be introduced into the British 
constitution." 

The Capitol of the United States is not above criticism in these 



HOUSES OF COMMONS AND OF REPRESENTATIVES. 119 

respects, but it is a far more commodious and sensible edifice than 
its vaster and more elaborate rival. 

Dismissing the architecture of the palace henceforward, we 
come to the composition of the House of Commons as it existed in 
1868. 

Through the enactments of the Reform Acts of 1830-32, the House 
of Commons consisted of six hundred and fifty-eight members, who 
were returned, as follows : — 



English County Members, 

University, . 

Cities and Boroughs, 

Welsh County Members, . 

■ Cities and Boroughs, 

Scotch County Members, . 

Cities and Boroughs, 

Irish Count^ Members, 

University, . 

Cities and Boroughs, 



143 

4 > 
324 . 



} 
} 



29 
53 



30 
23 
64 ) 

2 [ 105 
39 J 



The effect of the Reform Act of 1867 will be considered further 
along in the chapter. 

The Speaker of the House of Commons is chosen by each Parlia- 
ment for the whole of the session, and from amongst its own mem- 
bers. If, during that Parliament, the political sentiment of the 
country changes, the Speaker still keeps his place. Mr. Shaw 
Lefevre was Speaker from 1839 through three Parliaments. He re- 
ceives twenty-five thousand dollars a year and a furnished residence, 
and at the close of his official life receives a peerage and a pension 
of twenty-thousand dollars. He is also a member of the Queen's 
Privy Council. He gives only the casting vote, "names" for cen- 
sure contemptuous members, and in extreme cases orders members 
into custod}^. The Queen is permitted by law to refuse to confirm 
the Speaker after the House elects him ; but if she should really do 
this the country would start up in violent agitation. 

This officer is, in almost every respect, the model of the office of 
Speaker of the American House of Representatives. He gets about 
four times the salary and perquisites of the American Speaker, how- 
ever. 

The chairman of Committees of the Whole House is also chairman 
of the Ways and Means Committee, and some other committees of 
the House. He is a censor and inspector of all private bills ; his 



120 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

salary is seventy-five hundred dollars a year, and the office is a 
political one. 

The Clerk of the House of Commons holds for life. He is appointed 
by the Queen, and appoints his own clerks, of whom there are thirty- 
six. He presides at the election of a Speaker, and his office is almost 
identical with that of the Clerk of the House of Representatives at 
Washington. His salary is ten thousand dollars, and his two prin- 
cipal assistant clerks receive seventy-five hundred, and five thousand 
dollars a year respectively. The Clerk's in America is a political 
office, and he is dismissed at every change of party, and also in some 
cases by the party which elected him. 

The Sergeant-at-Arms of the House of Commons is a sort of con- 
stable to the Speaker. 

He appoints the doorkeepers, porters, and pages, is the ceremonial 
officer of the House, and is paid six thousand dollars a year, with an 
allowance for house-rent. He wears a sword at his side. 

The Sergeant-at-Arms in 1868 was a nobleman, three of the clerks 
were baronets, and the superintending short-hand writer was the same 
official in both Houses. In the United States, the sergeant's office, 
through u constructive " mileage, the rendering of duplicate and 
fraudulent accounts, and the use of funds entrusted to the Sergeant 
for his own influence and profit, has become discreditable. The 
following persons are ineligible for membership in the House of 
Commons : government contractors, police justices, sheriffs, mayors, 
bailiffs, judges of the superior court, tax, custom, and stamp officers, 
foreigners, clerg} r men, pensioners of the crown, bankrupts, English 
peers, Scotch peers, and Irish peers sitting in the House of Lords. 
Kobody but members is allowed to perambulate the House of Com- 
mons, whereas, in America, ex-members can claim the privilege of 
the floor. A county member must own property worth three thousand 
dollars a year ; a borough member one-half that amount. 

A member accepting any office under the executive government 
has to be re-elected to retain his seat in the House of Commons. He 
cannot resign his seat in the Commons except by accepting an office 
under the crown, and there are various nondescript and sinecure 
places of this kind filled for no other purpose. 

In America the House of Representatives is composed of citizens 
elected from congressional districts. Territories, or districts not formed 
under State government, send a delegate merely. The number of dis^ 
tricts in a State is regulated by population, according to a census 






HOUSES OF COMMONS AND OF REPRESENTATIVES. 121 

taken every ten years, and while these districts cannot be arbitrarily 
increased in number, they are sometimes gerry-mandered or altered 
in their boundaries to accomplish partisan objects. Neither counties, 
cities, nor any of the fixed local distinctions, are recognized in Con- 
gress. The city of New York is composed, nationally, of a certain 
number of congressional districts merely, and it often happens that 
part of a city, and part of the next county, are united to make one 
district. Thus the republic is like a network of unequal squares 
thrown over the surface of the ground. The ground is the history 
of population, the net is the government of it. The ground is the 
original colony ; the net is the nation. Looking through the open 
thread of the Federal state we see particular neighborhoods in their 
county or corporate circumstances. Boston as Boston has no mem- 
ber in Congress. Yet look through the districts of the net, and you 
can see who sits for Boston by accident. 

The contrary is the case in the House of Commons. There 
every member represents an original settlement and not a part of a 
census. Our Congress is representative or popular. The English 
House of Commons is the representative of neighborhood traditions, 
venerable charters, and original and arbitrary divisions of the soiL 
By a fixed routine of population, ascertained by deliberate census, we 
reconstruct Congress every ten years. A new State is formed out of 
newly populated territory, and it gains or loses in districts as it re- 
tains population. Not so in England, where there have been but 
two reorganizations of Parliament in history, — one in 1832, another 
in 1867. 

Every member of the House of Commons represents either a coun- 
ty, a city, a borough, or a university. Let us see if we know pre- 
cisely what each of these terms means. 

1. Counties were formed by the Saxons before the time of Alfred 
the Great, and the Normans found them intact and well defined when 
they landed. A county is an administrative division of the English 
government, like the District of an United States Marshal and 
Court. For example, there are two divisions of Pennsylvania, each 
having a court and officers. In England and Wales there are fifty-two 
counties, in Scotland thirty-three, and in Ireland thirty-two. Penn- 
sylvania alone has sixty-five counties, or the same number that Scot- 
land and Ireland possess together, and yet it has scarcely more peo- 
ple than the single county of Lancashire in England. Every county 
is presided over by a Lord Lieutenant, who is the head of the militia, 



122 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

and it has also a Keeper of the Rolls, a Sheriff, a Receiver General 
of taxes, a Coroner, Justices and Clerks of the Peace, and Courts of 
Assize, County, and Hundred. These English counties, in the main, 
correspond to the States of the American Union, yet are not sovereign 
like our States, but are rather viceroy al ties. The members of Par- 
liament who come from the counties have been elected by the pro- 
prietors and occupiers of the land. 

2. A city in the true English sense is a town corporate, with a 
bishop and a cathedral church The word cathedral is derived from 
a bishop's throne or chair, deposited in it. A town corporate is a 
town capable of using its name like a person in business and of su- 
ing and beins; sued. The first free cities of modern times were in 
Italy, and their example w T as imitated in France, Flanders, and Ger- 
many. They bought or wrested their rights from the Prince, and were 
mainly composed of trades-unions or guilds. Such are some English 
cities to this day in a parliamenta^ sense, as I have shown in the 
chapter on London, — a collection of mercantile and trading associa- 
tions, made up of u freemen," who vote for members of Parliament. 
With us a city gets its charter from a State, but this entitles it 
merely to local self-government, and gives it no representation in 
the Legislature. Politically an English city is quite a different thing 
from an American city. 

3. Borough is a word of Saxon origin, said to have meant 
" walled town." The Normans found eighty-two boroughs when they 
arrived in England. Each borough held its own fair or market, and 
maintained its borough court The borough was a sort of confeder- 
ated neighborhood, generally rallying about a castle or village, and 
showing or claiming to have once received a charter. It was often 
governed by a little oligarchy of landholders, or by a guild or series 
of guilds. After the House of Commons was established in Eng- 
land, each of these boroughs claimed the right to send a member or 
members to Parliament. In 1830 there were one hundred and seven- 
ty-one English boroughs. 

4. A university is an ancient and honorable endowment, requir- 
ing representation to protect and dignify it. Oxford, Cambridge, 
Dublin, and the University of London are represented in Parliament. 
Oxford University members are voted for by Doctors and Masters of 
Arts, whose names are on the books, amounting to three thousand 
seven hundred and eighty-six electors. Cambridge has four thou- 



HOUSES OF COMMONS AXD OF REPRESENTATIVES. 123 

sand nine hundred and forty-nine electors. Dublin has one thousand 
seven hundred electors. 

I have said nothing in this chapter about the members of the 
Cinque (five) Ports, which are a set of old, decayed maritime towns, 
which were once admitted to Parliament because of their gallantry 
in naval warfare, and there they stick, to this generation. 

To see the inequality of English representation observe the dif- 
ference between Sandwich, one of these Cinque Ports, and London 
city in 18G8. Sandwich had two members, who represented about 
nine hundred voters ; London proper four, who represented about 
eleven thousand voters. 

Portarlington, Ireland, gives about eighty votes, and has a member ; 
while Birmingham, which gives ten thousand votes, and elects John 
Bright, has only two members. 

Looking over the House of Commons, we see that all the members 
represent traditional neighborhoods, counties, or corporations in this 
way. But in the time in which we write, a Reform Bill is about to 
go into operation, and this will affect the electors of Parliament, 
though not materially the number and appearance of the House itself. 
Before we take up this new bill, therefore, let us ask ourselves the 
question, as we keep the House of Commons in view, *What was the 
origin of this body, and why did it need reforming? 

Parliament, a word of French origin, had its beginning in the 
Norman House of Lords. The Lords, resisting the Kings, invited the 
counties to give them support and to contribute delegates. About 
the middle of the thirteenth century the House of Commons was 
clearly defined. Henceforward 'it was the instrument of voting 
money, — little more. Excepting some single splendid episodes, as 
of the Stuart and Puritan Parliaments, the history of the House of 
Commons from the time of Henry VI. to 1830 was a series of bril- 
liant personal apparitions, without aggregate virtue, or love of free- 
dom. " Time had augmented its deformities," says an author,* " till 
it had degenerated into a mere mocker} r , obvious to the minds of all 
by the ludicrous contrast of old Sarum and Gatten with representa- 
tives, — Birmingham and Manchester without a voice. By nomina- 
tion boroughs, close corporations, and the peculiarities of the count} r 
franchise, only one interest was substantially incorporated into the 
Legislature. Land was omnipotent ; commerce, manufactures, ship- 

* Mr. John Wade. 



124 THE NEW WOKLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

ping, — all that had created the material greatness and opulence of 
the realm were dumb. An oligarchy ruled, and the laws it made, the 
measures it supported, and those it proscribed, savored of the char- 
acter, the interests, and the prejudices of their authors. By patriotic 
and enlightened men, parliamentary reform was deemed the sole cor- 
rective of the constitution." The Reform Bill, so called, extinguished 
fifty-six effete boroughs, which had been sending one hundred and 
eleven members to Parliament. It cut thirty boroughs down to one 
member. It gave one hundred and fifty-nine members to eighty-two 
county constituencies, and distributed amongst the better boroughs 
and the cities one hundred and forty-three members. Yet, after all 
this so-called reform, it was said by Earl Gray, the chief supporter 
of the bill, that " it was the most aristocratic measure that ever 
passed the House of Commons ; " and we can readily imagine this to 
be so, if, as the appendix to the Reform Bill of 1867 shows, two hun- 
dred English and Welsh boroughs, with a population of eight million 
six hundred and thirty-eight thousand five hundred and sixty-nine 
persons, had only four hundred and eighty-nine thousand and seventy- 
one registered voters, including nearly fifty thousand who voted on 
some ancient qualifications, and w r ere called Freemen, Potwallers, 
Scot and Lot voters, etc. 

To this miserably little extension of the franchise is yet ascribed 
the progress of England in the last forty years. It called into 
political existence the manufacturing cities, repealed the corn-laws, 
carried free-trade, and gave opportunity to John Bright and Richard 
Cobden. Poor as the gift wns, it was opposed bitterly by nearly 
every nobleman, and at the head of these stood the Duke of Welling- 
ton. The noisy scenes in the preceding chapter illustrate the feeling 
amongst the peers when this bill was pressed. It will be further 
considered in the chapter on Political Parties in England. 

The next extension of the franchise was granted in 1867, and as, 
at this writing, it has not gone entirely into effect, my notice of the 
matter will be brief. 

The royal assent to this important act, entitled " The representa- 
tion of the people's act, 1867," was given on the 15th of August in 
that year. It will not probably pass into entire operation till the 
latter part of the present year (1869). 

Scotland, Ireland, and the two English universities are excepted 
from the operations of this act. It provides that every man above 
twenty-one years of age, of the following classes, shall be registered 



HOUSES OF COMMONS AND OF REPRESENTATIVES. 125 

as a voter, and shall vote for a member or members to serve in Par- 
liament : — 

1. Who has occupied a whole dwelling, either as tenant or owner, 
for one year, and paid the poor rates, or taxes. 

2. Who has lodged in a part of one house for a year, where his 
rooms, unfurnished, cost not less than fifty dollars in gold a 
year. 

3. Who owns real estate, chattels, or has a bank account bringing 
a clear income of twenty-five dollars a year, and who pays taxes 
thereon. 

4. Who rents and occupies land worth sixty gold dollars a year, 
and pays poor rates. 

By the same act four corrupt boroughs are disfranchised and every- 
body in them who took bribes is disfranchised by name. In con- 
tested elections where three members of Parliament are to be selected 
no person shall vote for more than two, nor shall any hired election 
agent, canvasser, etc., vote at all. All boroughs with less than ten 
thousand people return but one member. London in the aggregate 
gets four more members, making fourteen in all for three millions of 
people ; while New York State, with nearly four millions, has thirty- 
one congressmen. Twelve new boroughs are created. The city of 
Manchester gets three members, and the boroughs of Liverpool, Bir- 
mingham, and Leeds three apiece. The University of London gets a 
member. Londoners can live twenty-five miles out of the city and 
still vote there. 

If anybody pays another person's taxes to get his vote, he 
and the second person shall be punished for briber}\ Several coun- 
ties are divided into boroughs. Twenty-three little boroughs return 
but one member hereafter. 

This Reform Bill answered the expectations of the English masses 
very imperfectly. It was tendered by a tory or anti-popular ministry 
to retain power, and fell far short of the intentions of the opposite 
party. * 

* Reform Bills were passed for Scotland and Ireland in July, 18 G8. In Scotland the fran- 
chise for boroughs is the same as in England, but seventy dollars in gold must be the an- 
nual tenure, or rent, paid for land in the counties. Seats are given to the universities of 
Glasgow and Edinburgh. Glasgow gets three members in Parliament, with four hundred 
thousand people, while Philadelphia, with five hundred and fifty thousand people, has not 
quite five members in Congress. To make room for several new Scotch county members, 
seven English boroughs were disfranchised. In Ireland, the occupation franchise in towns 
was reduced to twenty dollars, and for lodgers fifty dollars yearly rent paid for unfurnished 



126 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

We publish in the United States a little pamphlet directory of 
each session of Congress. It is compiled by clerks, and is exceed- 
ingly meagre and often imperfect. In England, however, there are 
many directories of .Parliament, gleaned with care and minuteness, 
and expressed with elegance. By running through any one of these 
" Companions " or directories, we get some quaint insight into the 
character of Parliament. 

First, the names of all constituencies are given, their population, 
the number of votes polled in each and of their registered electors. 
Then there is a short biography of every member, his parentage, age, 
profession, office, church patronage, political principles and pledges, 
public acts, and the name of his clubs and residences. 

An English M. P. is always a club man, and club life in England 
is intimately associated with political life. Out of Parliament a 
member is generally sought at his club, where, perhaps, he takes his 
meals, receives his letters, attends to the desires of his constituents, 
and whence he is summoned by telegraph on occasion of party 
necessities to cast his vote with his party. 

I give below some extracts from the Parliamentary Companion for 
1868. 

"Boston. — (The original of Boston, Massachusetts), Lincolnshire. 

John Wingfield Malcolm, 646 

Thomas Parry, 465 

Meaburn Staniland, . . . . . 453 

" On petition, March, 1866, a scrutiny being made, fourteen votes were struck 
off Mr. Parry's number, which gave a majority of two to Meaburn Staniland. 

" On Mr. Staniland accepting the Chiltern Hundreds, new writ, March, 1867, 
Thomas Parry was returned to Parliament. 

41 Constituency. — Corporation and freemen paying scot and lot, and the ho. 
of 10?. Population, 17,803. Registered electors, 1,093, including 148 free- 
men." 

Explanation. — Staniland, the name in italics, was the unsuccessful candi- 
date, but Parry's seat being contested, Staniland received it. Then Staniland 
accepted office under the government, or took the sinecure place called the 
Chiltern Hundred, a sort of fictitious hole to put weary pegs in. A new elec- 
tion was ordered at Boston, and Parry was elected at last by the holders of 

apartments. Dublin city has two members, Dublin county two, and Dublin University 
two, which would make, if they were at all representative, six members for a city and 
county of more than four hundred thousand people, — the same number that New York city 
has in Congress. 






HOUSES OF COMMONS AND OF REPRESENTATIVES. 127 

property, with ten pounds a year by " scot and lot" right, an ancient privi- 
lege, and by members of the town companies, or " free men." 

" York City. — (I instance this as a quaint manner of comparison between 
Old York and New York cities, although the American city was not 
named for the English one, but for the Duke of York,, afterwards 
James II.) 

James Lowther, \ 7 2,079 

George Leeman, ...'.. 1,854 
Joshua P. B. Westhead, .... 1,792 

"Constituency. — Freemen, freeholders, and the ho. of 101. Population, 
43,385. Registered electors, 4,724, including 2,571 freemen." 

Explanation. — Only one person in ten is an elector in York. The electors 
are members of the city guilds, property owners, and those who pay fifty 
dollars a year rent. 

" Hertford, Borough. — (I instance this as an odd sort of comparison 
with the city of Hartford, Connecticut, where this book is published.) 

Right Honorable William H. Cowper, . — 
Sir Minto Farquhar, — 

" On the death of Sir Minto Farquhar, new writ June, 1866. 

Robert Dinsdale, ^— 

" Constituency. — Freemen and the ho. of 10Z. Population, 6,769. Regis- 
tered electors, 602, including 96 freemen. The Marquess of Salisbury has 
considerable influence in this borough, as has also Earl Cowper." 

Explanation. — The new writ referred to above required a new election. 
The same thing takes place in any American constituency on the death or 
retirement of a congressman. 

" Bristol, Gloucestershire. — (This town is instanced to show the con- 
stituency of Sir Morton Peto, the baronet, who was a prominent 
railroad stockholder in America, and made us a visit before his 
failure in 1866.) 

Francis F. H. Berkeley, .... 5,296 
Sir S. Morton Peto, .... 5,228 
Thomas Francis Fremantle, . . . 4,269 

" Constituency. — Freemen and freeholders, and the ho. of 10Z. Population, 
154,093. Registered electors, 14,324, including 1,707 freemen." 

Turning from Bristol constituency to another part of the book, we 
find the name and history of its representatives : — 

"Peto, Sir Samuel Morton, bart. (Bristol), son of the late William Peto, 
Esquire, Cookham, Berks, by the daughter of Ralph Alio way, Esquire, of 



128 THE NEW WOELD COMPAKED WITH THE OLD. 

Dorking Surrey. Born at Woking, 1809. Married (1st) 1831, his cousin, 
Mary, eldest daughter of Thomas de la Garde Grisel, Esquire, of Stockwell 
Common, Surrey. (She died May, 1842.) Married (2nd) 1843, eldest daugh- 
ter of Henry Kelsall. Esquire, of Rochdale, Lancashire. A member of the 
firm of Peto and Betts, contractors for Public Works. Constructed the 
Crimean Railway without profit to himself in 1855, and for his services was 
made a baronet. A Magistrate and Deputy-Lieutenant for Suffolk, and a 
Magistrate for Norfolk and Middlesex. A liberal (radical) ; in favor of the 
extension of the franchise to the working-class, vote by ballot, and " complete 
religious freedom to every denomination. " Sat for Norwich from July, 1847, 
till December, 1857; for Finsbury from May, 1859, till July, 1865, when he 
was elected for Bristol. Residences and clubs, Kensington Palace Gardens, 
West, Chipsteacl, Seven Oaks, Kent. Reform club, Auchlyne, Killin, Perth- 
shire." 

Explanation. — The above shows what family influence Sir Morton Peto 
has, hints at his wealth and idiosyncrasies, and shows that he has a town 
residence in London, an English country house, and a Scotch estate. 

No salary is paid to a member of Parliament. A senator, or a con- 
gressman of the United States, is paid five thousand dollars a year. 
The Speaker, as we have said, is generally re-elected at the beginning of 
Parliament as long as his political party retains power. In 1866, for 
example, the Eight Honorable John Evelyn Denison was proposed 
for Speaker by Mr. Monsell, seconded by Earl Grosvenor, and for 
the third time unanimously re-elected. Mr. Sergeant Yelverton, 
who was elected during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, gave a good 
description of the qualifications required in a Speaker, whether for 
Parliament or Congress. " He that supplieth this place ought to be 
a man big and comely, stately, and well spoken, his voice great, his 
courage majestical, and his purse plentiful and heavy." If two can- 
didates are nominated for Speaker, the house divides, or settles the 
vote by tellers. 

Notwithstanding the fact that no salary is attached to the place 
of an M.P., the privileges, social opportunities, and honors of the 
place are held in so great request that bribery and chicanery are 
freely used to accomplish elections. In the United States, a con- 
gressman is invariably a resident in the district which he represents ; 
but this is not of necessity the case in Parliament, and if a man is 
needed in the House of Commons, he can be passed round by his 
party from borough to borough till he is elected somewhere. The 
limited franchise, and the power of landholders to influence or compel 
the votes of their tenants, lead to many abuses, but there is also 
a corrupt and purchasable class of voters in England, whose degrada- 



HOUSES OF COMMONS AND OF REPRESENTATIVES. 129 

tion is an annual theme of parliamentary inquiry. Looking over 
some of the documents upon English election frauds, I find that in 
Harwich, consisting of one hundred and twenty voters, one Attwood, 
the tory candidate, spent thirty-one thousand dollars in one election, 
and his opponents enough more to make in all forty-five thousand 
five hundred dollars. Another investigation showed that in Nottin^-- 
ham eighty-five thousand dollars were spent on a constituency of 
four thousand five hundred people, or about twenty dollars to a man. 
The reader of novels, who wishes to find in pleasant narrative form 
the manner of conducting an English election, may do so in Thack- 
eray's " Newcomes," or in George Elliott's " Felix Holt, the Rad- 
ical." The daily newspapers are adjuncts to the most shameless 
parliamentary corruption, in witness of which see the following ad- 
vertisement from the London " Times " of July 1st, 1847 : — 

"To Parliamentary Candidates. — Messrs. and Co., of Street, 

London, have all the machinery requisite to carry out the election of an 
M. P., including registry, canvass clerks, etc., and writers of eminence would 
be placed at the disposal of candidates. Borough or county registers expe- 
ditiously arranged." 

Quoting the above, <a number of the u Westminster Review " enters 
into the discussion of election and bribery, and says of the abuses 
of landlord and tenant : — 

" Let a map be made of the island according to the estates of the 
four and twenty thousand proprietors who own it, and color the 
estates according to the politics of their landlords. You will dis- 
cover in this way the character of the votes of the tenants. They 
are merely the voting-machines of their farms. The rich man, who 
buys a ten-pound house in a small borough, just buys a ten-pound 
vote. The attorneys in many large boroughs make sure that scarcely 
any man shall get in without paying black-mail to them. The House 
of Commons is thus made a club of rich men, when it ought to be a 
workshop for the people." 

The same fearless " Review " continues : — 

" The maintenance of a property qualification is indefensible on any 
principle of justice, right, or expediency. It has been the mere bul- 
wark of class elevation. It does not insure intelligence ; for the 
inadequacy of parliamentary intelligence is everywhere apparent. It 
does not even color the every-day fallacy of the patriotism of prop- 
erty ; for we have bankrupts, spendthrifts, and blase gamblers and 
17 



130 



THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 



speculators in the legislature, — men only saved from the disgrace of 
a prison by the privileges of their position/' 

The House of Commons never had a manual prepared for it, reg- 
ulating order and precedence, till 1857, when Thomas Erskine May 
undertook the work, and this should be consulted by any reader who 
is minutely curious about parliamentary law. In America Thomas 
Jefferson wrote a manual in the early years of the republic, and John 
M. Barclay, Journal Clerk of the House of Representatives, has very 
recently made a digest of the Rules of the House, which is said by 
Mr. Speaker Colfax to be the best book of the sort extant. The 
House of Representatives has had some notable Speakers, of whom 
Henry Clay had probably most will, N. P. Banks superior "pres- 
ence " and bearing, and Schuyler Colfax much readiness. 

The House of Representatives was created when the constitution 
was adopted essentially as it exists. The House of Commons is a 
history of creepings-up, — at first an intimidated body, permitted to 
meet by way of compliment, to vote money else wrested from it ; 
now the great political estate of the realm, with absolute and exclu- 
sive power to vote or withhold money. The Senate can alter an 
appropriation bill of the House of Representatives, or suggest a field 
of expenditure. The peers cannot amend nor originate any appro- 
priation bill, but must either entirely accept or entirely reject it. 
Not even the standing army can be maintained except by an annual 
vote of the Commons, and yet this powerful body in all formal mat- 
ters is subservient and deferential to both the sovereign and the 
peers. In theory the House of Commons is intended to protect the 
liberties of the people, who are the tax-payers, while the House of 
Peers is intended to protect the rights of the Sovereign. I shall take 
up the House of Commons and treat of its manner of organization, 
so as to make a connected narrative jointly with the proceedings 
already described in the Chamber of Peers. 

A new Parliament is summoned by the Queen, who, in her Council 
of State, commands the Lord Chancellor (or President of the Peers), 
to issue the summons. The Lord Chancellor, in obedience directs the 
Clerk of the Crown to issue writs, signed with the Great Seal, to all 
the Sheriffs of counties in the realm. Then each Sheriff, receiving 
his order, directs the returning officers of the municipalities, boroughs, 
etc., in his county to conduct the election. The election itself will be 
considered in the chapter on Political Parties. After the elections 
are over, the Sheriff sends the results back to the Clerk of the Crown, 



HOUSES OF COMMONS AND OF REPRESENTATIVES. 131 

who publishes the names of the new members in the gazettes. Then 
the Queen, by proclamation, appoints the time of meeting, and as we 
have already seen, goes in person, or sends commissioners, to open 
Parliament. 

Victoria has enacted this form seven times. 

When the Commons meet together, the first business, as in Con- 
gress, is to elect a Speaker. The Clerk of the House, being a perma- 
nent officer, presides, and some member, addressing him, makes a 
nomination. When the Speaker has been chosen, he is escorted to 
his chair by the mover and seconder of his nomination, and there he # 
returns thanks to the House. Immediately the mace, the symbol of 
his office, is taken from under the table before him and laid in fall 
view upon the top of the table. Some elderly and influential mem- 
ber then goes gravely up to the Speaker, and shakes hands with him. 
The House at once adjourns. 

The next day the Commons meet again and go up to the House of 
Lords, where they are received by the Lord Chancellor, the presiding 
officer of that body. On behalf of the Queen the Lord Chancellor 
approves of the Speaker elected, and the Speaker then, in behalf of 
his House, asks that all the ancient rights and privileges of the Com- 
mons may be continued. The Chancellor, in the name of the Queen, 
confirms these rights. Then the House returns to its cham- 
ber. 

The next two or three days are spent in taking oaths of allegiance, 
which the Speaker administers, and the oath has been a subject of 
trouble for many years, being obnoxious to many sectarians and folks 
with scruples. It was not till 1858 that Jews were formally admitted 
to Parliament, and in 1833 Moravians and Quakers had to be espe- 
cially qualified. In 1852 Viscount Clancarty, a Protestant, was re- 
fused permission to take the Roman Catholic oath, which he preferred. 
In 1851 Alderman Salomans, a Hebrew, was rejected from Parlia- 
ment for refusing the regular oath, and in 1829 O'Connell refused to 
take the oath of supremacy. 

No business can now be done till the Queen formally opens Parlia- 
ment. The Commons on that day wait in their chamber till the 
Black Pod, the ceremonial officer of the Peers, comes to summon 
them. He stands without and strikes the door three times with his 
rod. The door being opened, he walks up the middle of the floor 
escorted by the Sergeant-at-Arms of the House, and bows three times 
with great impressiveness. Having expressed to the Speaker the 



132 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

Queen's commands that the Commons attend her immediately in the 
Chamber of Peers, the Black Rod walks out backward, bowing still. 
The House proceed in some order to the Chamber of Peers, and, hear- 
ing the speech, return to their own chamber, where they generally pass 
some small formal bill to prove their independence, and again ad- 
journ. 

The Clerk of the Crown has meantime given the Clerk of the House 
a list of members returned, and any contests are introduced by peti- 
tion and referred to their proper place for consideration. The House 
now proceeds, like the Peers, to answer the Queen's opening address, 
and when this has been done, paragraph by paragraph, and debated, 
the Commons proceed to the Queen's palace with their answer, the 
Speaker in a state coach. Once they kept the Queen waiting half an 
hour, — in 1845, — and the nation expressed great indignation. The 
scene of presenting the answer is an interesting one ; but if the Queen 
be at Windsor or elsewhere, a committee from both Houses proceeds 
there with the reply. In either case the Speaker and the Lord Chan- 
cellor walk together, and are ushered to the Queen's presence by the 
Lord Chamberlain. The Parliament is now ready for straightforward 
business, and you will observe the political parses in it at once, yet 
both parties go by the Queen's name, one being Her Majesty's Minis- 
try, the other Her Majesty's Opposition. The front bench of the 
House of Commons on the right hand of the Speaker is called the 
Treasury bench ; for there sits the leader of the administration, or 
Prime Minister, whose official title is " First Lord of the Treasury." 
His colleagues are around him, and on the bench facing them sit the 
vigilant and unappeasable opposition. The members who represent 
London city proper claim the right to a part of the front bench. Every 
seat has a brass plate on the back of it, with the name of the member 
who claims it. Forty members present make a quorum. As in the 
American Congress, there are fixed days for certain kinds of 
work. 

The House early in the session resolves itself into a Committee of 
Supply, to consider the estimates of money required to support the 
different services ; namely, Army and Navy, the Civil Services, 
Salaries of Custom, Inland Revenue, and Post Offices, Packet (ship) 
Service, and Fortifications. 

Then the House resolves itself into a Committee of Ways and 
Means, to devise the means of raising the supplies of money already 
granted. 






HOUSES OF COMMONS AND OF REPRESENTATIVES. 133 

Finally, at the end of the session, they pass the annual Appropri- 
ation Act. The chapter on " Finance " will take up the above 
matters in detail. 

The right of petition, which John Quincy Adams so magnificently 
vindicated in the American Congress, is a fundamental principle of 
the British Constitution, and has been exercised from the earliest 
times. In the year 1868, one thousand seven hundred and seventy- 
six petitions, officially signed and sealed, were presented, and seven- 
teen thousand eight hundred and sixty-five altogether. More than 
two and a half millions of names were appended to these petitions. 
The petition of the Chartists some years ago for a republicanized 
government was so immense that it was rolled into the House of 
Commons like a huge cart-wheel. These petitions are crammed into 
bags, and carried out, to be considered, let us charitably suppose. 

One of the great periods of a parliamentary session is the discus- 
sion upon the "Budget," which is derived from the French word 
bougette, a bag. 

It is an annual speech, with a comparative statement of the expen- 
ditures and receipts of the country in the year passing and the years 
past, and a justification and explanation of the same. 

Expunging resolutions, such as were passed blotting from the jour- 
nal of the House of Representatives a censure of President Jack- 
son, are sometimes passed in Parliament, as in 1782, in the case of 
John Wilkes, and in 1833, in the matter of Sir Robert Peel and Wil- 
liam Cobbett. 

Petitions from London city are presented by the Sheriffs thereof, 
in red gowns and occasionally by the Lord Mayor. The Lord Maj'or 
of Dublin also appears for the same purpose at rare opportunities. 

No member of the House of Commons can speak insolently of the 
Queen, nor urge her private opinion to affect any matter of legisla. 
tion. Seldom does any member answer newspaper articles in his 
place, and a member of one house seldom makes any reference to the 
other house. ThSse matters are less scrupulously observed in the 
American Congress. The President is quoted to influence or defeat a 
bill, and is frequently spoken of with acrimony and invective. As 
to newspaper articles, there are many congressmen who are known to 
fame in America only for explanations on this head. 

There is a good deal of button-holing and claim-urging in the lob- 
bies of Parliament ; but the floor is carefully guarded from the access 
of corrupt or impudent attorneys. Respectable counsel are licensed to 



134 THE NEW WOULD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

plead claims before committees, and this arrangement is found to give 
credit and intelligence to the prosecution of claims. On the score 
of personal avarice and corruption, members of the House of Com- 
mons have not a like opportunity with congressmen, and the allega- 
tion and investigation of charges against personal honor are less 
frequent in the British than in the American Legislature. The House 
of Commons can punish contempts of its authority, give its committees 
right to send for persons and papers, and commit offenders to prison 
till the close of the pending session. Congress holds, and frequently 
practises, the same authority. Congress generally meets at noon, 
and holds night sessions when business has unduly accumulated. The 
House of Commons meets at four o'clock, except on Wednesdays, 
when it meets at noon. If business accumulates unduly, it holds day 
sessions. All great debates in the Commons take place by gas- 
light. 

The essential difference between Congress and Parliament is the 
presence of the executive government in the Legislature. There sit the 
Cabinet Officers and the President (Prime Minister) of the state, de- 
veloping their policy, answering questions of moment, struggling to 
retain the confidence of a majority of the House, and voting upon 
measures of their own proposition. The House of Commons is thus the 
concentrated theatre of political agitation. A presidential election is 
liable to take place within it at any time and by its whim or im- 
pulse the wealth and influence of the entire administration may be 
transferred from one party or sentiment to another. 

The debates of Parliament are printed in the newspapers, but with- 
out authority, and it is a breach of privilege theoretically for re- 
p jrters to be present, or for publishers to circulate the proceedings. 
Like many other things in the English government, which are illegal, 
but inevitable, this transgression has become a formidable right. 
Newspaper reporting in the Llouse of Commons began during the 
American Revolution, and Dr. Johnson was one of the earliest note- 
takers. After the close of the British wars, in 1844, when the legis- 
lative proceedings monopolized attention, the work of publishing the 
debates was earnestly and fully undertaken. The debates of the 
American Congress are reported at the cost of the government, and 
a daily paper, called the " Globe," contracts for the work. A large 
corps of phonographers are engaged, who are paid by the column. 
Many of these were taught their art at the public High School of 
Philadelphia, an institution which makes phonography a specialty. 



HOUSES OF COMMONS AND OF REPRESENTATIVES. 185 

The head of the corps, until recently, and one of the earliest short- 
hand writers in America, was Mr. Richard Sutton, who began his 
career, I think, in the reporters' gallery of the English Parliament. 
The publication of the debates is a subject of considerable expense in 
the United States, but they are rendered with remarkable exactness 
and promptitude. At the opening of each session at noon, daily, 
the " Globe" is found on every member's desk, containing a perfect 
transcript of the debates of the previous day. The " Globe " does 
not print the documents, bills, acts, memorials, and other papers 
which assist legislation. These are committed to the government 
printer, who has a great establishment near by the Capitol, and they 
are reproduced in folio, or in stitched pamphlet form, for ready use 
and reference. Collected together, they make the permanent public 
documents, and are bound, registered, and numbered. 

Attached to the House of Commons are two similar officers, the 
Printer of Journals and the Printer of Votes. But the government has 
no such institution of its own as the great-printing office at Wash- 
ington, which is alleged to be the most complete establishment in 
the world. The debates of Parliament are digested and reported 
with pains and cleverness in the London " Times," and other papers. 
The " Times "was formerly considered the most perfect newspaper 
which existed ; but this encomium does not hold good in many 
respects at the present day. There is editorial gravity without 
much conclusiveness in it ; but in the promptitude of its news, and 
the amount and variety of its matter, it is now surpassed by many 
journals in America, while late developments have shown that its man- 
agement is quite as unscrupulous and avaricious as that of papers else- 
where. It contains, daily, seventy-two columns of matter, or seven- 
teen thousand five hundred lines, or upwards of one million pieces 
of type. Its daily circulation was set down at fifty-nine thousand 
copies in 1867, of which thirty-three thousand are distributed in 
London. It employs one hundred and ten compositors of type, and 
twenty-five pressmen. There is no strong newspaper at the Capitol 
of the United States ; but in former days influential organs of opinion 
were maintained Inhere, chief of which in different fields were the 
" Intelligencer " and the " National Era," in the latter of which 
appeared parts of " Uncle Tom's Cabin," the anti-slavery novel. 

In both Parliament buildings and Capitol there are very many 
committee rooms ; for much of the work of large legislative bodies 
has to be considered by select committee, while the Legislature, in 



136 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

whole, is the ultimate body to accept or reject the act. Committees 
of Congress generally consist of from six to ten or twelve persons ; 
of the Commons, from twenty to thirty persons. The leading Com- 
mittee of Congress, Ways and Means, was composed, in 1868, of 
nine members ; while the whole of the House of Commons is resolved 
into that committee in England. Committee duty is compulsory in 
the Commons, and Smith O'Brien, once refusing to serve, was com- 
mitted to custody for contempt. 

To an American, the excess of forms, and the reverence for them, 
is the leading distinction of the English government, and of the 
House of Commons, its most practical manifestation. The Speaker 
must be elected by the Commons, and the selection communicated 
to the Queen. She " graciously " gives her consent, and the poor 
Speaker meantime makes himself ridiculous with excuses, timidities, 
and compliments. Next the superstition of the Mace is most appar- 
ent. There is no more use for the Mace than for the crowbar, and 
if the Speaker of the House of Representatives employed a war-club 
he would have as much reason. This Mace is laid before the 
Speaker of Commons while he sits in his place, is carried before him 
when he rises, and is put beneath the table when he leaves the chair- 
The absurdity of the Mace and the Sergeant-at-Arms is illustrated 
in a very amusing manner by the quarterly reviewer for 1857 : — 

" The most amusing ceremony," he says, " in which the bauble 
figures, is when a Master in Chancery comes with a message from 
the Lords. The Sergeant-at-Arms goes reverently up to the Speaker 
and announces the fact, and the Speaker kindly lends him the Mace, 
that he may receive the Master in a more imposing manner. Armed 
with — almost staggering under — the gilded load, the Sergeant walks 
down the House to fetch the Master. The pair form in line, and 
come marching up to the table, the Master being more splendid in 
regard to costume, but the Sergeant borrowing the reflected glory of 
the Mace. They bow at various stages of the journey, and the 
Master having arrived, delivers the message of the Lords, the Ser- 
geant standing by him with his grand weapon, and looking as if he 
were ready to castigate him on the spot if lie should show any lack 
of reverence. Then they retreat, pari passu, bowing whenever it 
occurs to them, and in this retrograde movement the Sergeant has an 
advantage, his legs being unincumbered, whereas the legs of the 
other are in chancery, and his gown is traitorous. Finally, the Ser- 
geant, having seen his companion back to the bar, comes up again, 



HOUSES OF COMMONS AND OF KEPRE SENT ATI YES. 137 

with more reverences, to return the Speaker his Mace, and then bows 
himself back to his own chair after these six promenades. 

" Strangers/' adds the sarcastic reviewer, "do not always look 
respectfully upon this ceremonial, but nothing is so wholesome as 
etiquette between neighbors." 

Violent combats and interchanges of violent language in the Amer- 
ican Congress have been a source of discredit to us at home and 
abroad ; but it must not be inferred that there is not also much igno- 
rance, ill-breeding, and boyish behavior in the House of Commons. 
In the month in which I write, May, 1869, I find this communication 
from a correspondent of the " London Pall Mall Gazette," who dates 
from the House of Commons, and signs himself " A Bloated Aris- 
tocrat " : — 

" I read," he says, " with great interest, yestercla}', your ingenious 
article on ' Manners in England and America.' It pleased me so 
much that I shall take care to send a copy of it to a gentleman, 
a member of the House of Commons, who was lately seen, in the 
reading-room of that assembly, to take his boots off preliminary to 
the enjoyment of his newspaper. Lounging in one chair, with his 
feet reposing in their stockings upon another, he made, in the sun- 
shine, a very striking, if not quite an agreeable, figure. To be sure, 
Tuesday was a very warm day, but that, I venture to think, is no 
excuse for this particular breach of good manners. Sir, pray print 
my letter as a hint to the gentleman in question ; otherwise, when 
the dog-da}^ come in, he may be* encouraged to strip himself still 
further, and that would really be offensive. Besides, bad manners 
are contagious, even (though } r ou might not think it) in so august an 
atmosphere as ours." 

"Among the smaller recreations of the House," says a review, 
" is the raising a terrific cry when a member new to parliamentary 
manners accidentally walks between the Speaker and the member 
speaking ; " but this breach of etiquette is the rule rather than the 
exception in the House of Representatives. The great majority 
of members of the House of Commons speak as educated men 
should do, but one frequently hears a member dropping his h's like 
the vulgarest cockney, saying, for example : — 

" I am too 'appy to leave the haffair hin the 'ands of the 'ouse ! " 

The Scotch and Irish accents, in all their forms, are heard in the 
House of Commons, but the Scotch speak very little, and the Irish 
very much. Long speeches are as frequently made as in America. 
18 



138 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Disraeli have, several times, spoken above 
five hours apiece. No instances of late date have happened of per- 
sonal affrays in Parliament, but many duels have been fought on 
account of words spoken in debate. To send or accept a challenge 
is now a breach of privilege. Coarse and taunting words and bitter 
repartees are as common in the English as in the American Legis- 
lature. I have selected from the debates two or three of the more 
aggravated instances of such personal collisions. 

That most truculent of all members of the House of Commons, 
Daniel O'Connell, often figured in brawls and skirmishes on the 
floor, and I recite here from the records, one particular instance : — 

" Mr. O'Connell rose, and said, ' The honorable member (Mr. 
Shaw) has expressed his opinions in a manner which can do no good 
service to his cause. There was a determination about him amount- 
ing almost to a spiritual ferocity. He seems to think that the 
Protestant religion consists of pounds, shillings, and pence." 

" Mr. Shaw [with great vehemence] : ' I deny that I said the 
Protestant religion consists of pounds, shillings, and pence. But 
the church establishment of any country must be supported by money, 
and that church which the state endowed with money became the 
established church. In such a situation stands the church which the 
honorable and learned member for Dublin has sworn not to subvert, 
and which he now attempts to subvert.' 

" Loud cries of ' Order ! order ! ' now proceeded from the minis- 
terial side of the House. The Irish members shouted the words with 
one voice. 

" Mr. O'Connell [with the greatest warmth and violence of gesture] : 
' I call the honorable Recorder to order. He has made use of a false 
assertion.' 

" Here Mr. O'Connell's voice was drowned amidst the deafening 
cries of ' Order ! ' which proceeded from all parts of the opposition 
side of the house. A number of honorable members rose at once, 
and accompanied the words with a corresponding violence of gesture. 
It is impossible to describe the confusion of the scene. 

" Mr. O'Connell resumed : ' The honorable member has accused 
me of having sworn one thing and clone another. It is quite out of 
order for a member to utter falsehoods.' 

" Here the opposition almost in a body shouted, ' Order ! order ! ' at 
the full stretch of their voices, mingled with cries of, ' Chair ! chair ! ' 
It was sometime before any measure of order was restored. When 



HOUSES OF COMMONS AND OF KEPRE SENT ATI VES. 139 

the uproar bad somewhat abated, Mr. Finn said, ' I pronounce the 
expression which has been uttered by the learned member for the 
Dublin University to be an atrocious calumny.' c The latter terms 
were pronounced with an emphasis/ says a sensitive reporter, c and 
were accompanied with a vehemence of gesture that defy descrip- 
tion.' 

" The confusion and uproar which now ensued, owing to the cries 
of ' Chair ! chair ! ' and ' Order ! order ! ' which burst from the oppo- 
sition side of the House, with the rising of many of the members from 
their seats, exceeded anything which can be imagined. In vain did 
Mr. Bernal endeavor, as chairman of the committee, to restore order. 
His voice was lost amidst the deafening noise which prevailed. 
Some degree of quiet being at length restored, Mr. Shaw rose, and 
with great warmth, said, ' The honorable member for Dublin 
knows that when he used the word falsehood — ' Here Mr. Shaw's 
voice was again drowned amidst renewed uproar and confusion, 
caused by the rising of seven or eight of the Irish members at once, 
each of them, at the same time, speaking in the loudest and most 
indignant tones. It would have been impossible to hear a single 
word either of them said, owing to so many persons speaking and 
shouting at the same instant ; but that difficulty was greatly in- 
creased by the shouts of c Chair ! chair ! ' which burst from the 
opposition side of the house. When the uproar had again partially 
subsided, Mr. Bernal said, in a most vehement and impassioned 
manner, 4 If I cannot restore and preserve order, I must dissolve 
the committee at once. It is impossible forme to maintain order 
when seven or eight honorable members all get up and speak at once.' 

" The determined manner and sharp rebuke of Mr. Bernal had, to 
a very great extent, the desired effect. 

" Then Mr. Shaw, still laboring under great excitement, and speak- 
ing with much warmth of manner, said, ' The honorable member (Mr. 
O'Connell) has charged me with being actuated by a spiritual feroci- 
ty ; but my ferocity is not of that description which takes for its 
symbol a death's-head and cross-bones.' [Tremendous cheers from the 
opposition, with uproar from the Irish members on the ministerial 
side of the house.] 

" Mr. O'Connell (addressing himself to Mr. Shaw personally, and 
not to the chairman): 'Yours is a calf's-heacl and jaw-bones.' 
[Deafening cheers from the ministerial side of the house, with cries 
of ' Order ! order ! ' ' Chair ! chair ! ' from the opposition.] 



140 THE NEW WOKLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

"Mr. Bernal again interposed his authority as chairman, when, hav- 
ing once more restored order, the business of the committee proceed- 
ed without any further material interruption." 

The parliamentary annalist, Grant, gives a still more indecent 
scene in one of his books of sketches. 

"I shall allude," he says, "to only one more scene of this kind. 
It occurred towards the close of a recent session. An honorable 
member, whose name I suppress, rose, amidst the most tremendous 
uproar, to address the House. He spoke, and was received, as 
nearly as the confusion enabled me to judge, as follows : ; I rise, sir 
[ironical cheers, mingled with all sorts of zoological sounds], I rise, 
sir, for the purpose of stating that I have — [" Oh ! oh ! " " Bah ! " 
and sounds resembling the bleating of a sheep, mingled with loud 
laughter.] Hon. gentlemen may endeavor to put me down by their 
unmannerly interruptions, but I have a duty to perform to my con— 
[Ironical cheers, loud coughing, sneezing, and yawning, extended 
to an incredible length, followed by bursts of laughter.] I say, 
sir, I have constituents who on this occasion expect that I — [Cries 
of " Should sit down," and shouts of laughter.] They expect, sir, 
that on a question of such importance [" O-o-a a-w," and loud 
laughter, followed by cries of " Order ! order ! order ! " from the 
Speaker.] I tell honorable gentlemen, who choose to conduct them- 
selves in such a way, that I am not to be put down by — [Groans, 
coughs, sneezings, hems, and various animal sounds, some of which 
closely imitated the yelping of a clog, and the squeaking of a pig, 
interspersed with peals of laughter.] I appeal — [" Cock-e-leeri-o- 
co ! " the imitation, in this case, of the crowing of a cock was so 
remarkably good, that not even the most staid and orderly members 
in the House could preserve their gravity. The laughter which 
followed drowned the speaker's cries of "Order! order!"] I sa} r , 
sir, this is most unbecoming conduct on the part of an assembly 
calling itself cle — [" Bow-wow-wow," and bursts of laughter.] Sir, 
may I ask, have honorable gentlemen who can — ["Mew-mew," and 
renewed laughter.] Sir, I claim the protection of the chair. [The 
Speaker here again rose and called out " Order ! order ! " in a loud 
and angry tone, on which the uproar in some measure subsided. ]| 
If honorable gentlemen will only allow me to make one observation, 
I will not trespass further on their attention, but sit down at once. 
[This was followed by the most tremendous cheering in earnest.] 
I only beg to say, sir, that I think this is a most dangerous and 



HOUSES OF COMMONS AND OF REPRESENTATIVES. 141 

unconstitutional measure, and will therefore vote against it.' The hon- 
orable gentleman then resumed his seat amidst deafening applause." 

In exhibitions of oratory recent times afford few great examples 
either in England or America. The historic or artificial standard of 
manhood is better maintained on the continent of Europe, and at 
present France and Spain can perhaps instance more fervid speakers 
than either Parliament or Congress. Favre, Berry er, Olivier, and 
Pelletan, in France, Castelar, and some others, in Spain, rank higher 
than contemporary English or American orators. Of one of Caste- 
lar' s speeches Mr. George Smalley wrote from London in May, 1869 : — 

" He spoke upon the impulse of the moment, without a note, with- 
out the least preparation. Such a mighty oration has not been deliv- 
ered in the Cortes within the memory of man. Gravid with historical 
facts, which poured from his memory in torrents, he battered the 
Canon's position to pieces, and pulverized every argument based up- 
on them. Frequently the applause from every part of the House in- 
terrupted him, and when he had brought his peroration to a close — 
a peroration unequalled for beauty of diction, force of language, 
and sublimity of imagery — the excitement was so great that the 
members of the chamber, irrespective of party, rushed up to him and 
congratulated him, Rivero leading the way, and embracing him on 
both cheeks. The scene was bewildering. The effect of the oration 
has not worn off yet. The young orator has received upwards of 
three hundred telegrams from all parts of the country, thanking him 
for this service to the cause of religious liberty and freedom of 
thought. There is a proposition that the Cortes shall print the 
speech by tens of thousands, and outside, all parties are uniting to 
present him with a testimonial. But these compliments, inerety per- 
sonal, and however deserving of record as indicating the esteem in 
which his marvellous powers are held, are really empty results, com- 
pared with the effect his terrible attack upon the church and the co- 
alition has had politically.' ' 

Our American oratory is best developed upon the " stump," or by 
attorneys at the bar. In the legislature our public men are merely 
debaters. The most able exhibitions of oratory witnessed in Con- 
gress during late years were those on the trial of the Impeachment 
of Andrew Johnson, President, when the speeches of William S. 
Groesbeck and William M. Evarts. were able, both as pleas and as 
pieces of literature. No member of the House of Commons is allowed 
to read his speech. 



142 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

It is doubtless within the curiosity of the reader to wish to com- 
pare the best specimens of parliamentary oratory, English and Amer- 
ican. I have been at pains, therefore, to cull two contemporary 
passages from eminent gentlemen of either nation, illustrative not 
only of the same event, but of the general purpose of this volume. 
The'se are Mr. Disraeli, late English Prime Minister, and Mr. George 
Bancroft, late American Cabinet Officer. The occasion was the 
passing of eulogiums upon the death of Abraham Lincoln. 

Said Mr. Disraeli, in the House of Commons : — 

" In the character of the victim, and even in the accessories of his 
last moments, there is something so homely and innocent, that it takes 
the question, as it were, out of all the pomp of history and the cer- 
emonial of diplomacy ; it touches the heart of nations, and appeals 
to the domestic sentiment of mankind. Whatever the various and 
varying opinions in this House, and in the country generally, on the 
policy of the late President of the United States, all must agree that 
in one of the severest trials which ever tested the moral qualities of 
man he fulfilled his duty with simplicity and strength. Nor is it pos- 
sible for the people of England at such a moment to forget that he 
sprang from the same fatherland, and spoke the same mother tongue. 
When such crimes are perpetrated the public mind is apt to fall into 
gloom and perplexity, for it is ignorant alike of the causes and the 
consequences of such deeds. But it is one of our duties to reassure 
them under unreasoning panic and despondency. Assassination has 
never changed the history of the world. I will not refer to the re- 
mote past, though an accident has made the most memorable instance 
of antiquity at this moment fresh in the minds and memory of all 
around me. But even the costly sacrifice of a Caesar did not pro- 
pitiate the inexorable destiny of his country. If we look to modern 
times, to times at least with the feelings of which we are familiar, 
and the people of which were animated and influenced by the same in- 
terests as ourselves, the violent deaths of two heroic men, Henry IV. 
of France, and the Prince of Orange, are conspicuous illustrations of 
this truth. In expressing our unaffected and profound sympathy with 
the citizens of the United States on this untimely end of their elected 
chief, let us not, therefore, sanction any feeling of depression, but 
rather let us express a fervent hope that from out of the awful trials 
of the last four years, of which the least is not this violent demise, 
the various populations of North America may issue elevated and 
chastened, rich with the accumulated wisdom, and strong in the dis- 



HOUSES OF COMMONS AND OF REPRESENTATIVES. 143 

ciplined energy, which a young nation can only acquire in a protracted 
and perilous struggle ; then they will be enabled not merely to renew 
their career of power and prosperity, but they will renew it to con- 
tribute to the general happiness of mankind." 

It is probable that no more excellent instance of Disraeli's remark- 
able power and grace in eulogy can be instanced than this. lie and 
Mr. Bancroft are alike literary men and statesmen. The latter's 
culture is no higher above that of the average of congressmen than 
is Disraeli's above the average of members of Parliament. I put 
Mr. Bancroft's comparison between Lincoln and Lord Palmerston, 
therefore, beside the above, and leave the relative merits of both to 
the judgment of the reader. 

"Palmerston," said Mr. Bancroft, " traced his lineage to the time 
of the conqueror ; Lincoln went back only to his grandfather. Pal- 
merston received his education from the best scholars of Harrow, 
Edinburgh, and Cambridge ; Lincoln's early teachers were the silent 
forest, the prairie, the river, and the stars. Palmerston was in pub- 
lic life for sixty years ; Lincoln, for but a tenth of that time. Palmer- 
ston was a skilful guide of an established aristocracy ; Lincoln, a 
leader or rather a companion of the people. Palmerston was exclu- 
sively an Englishman, and made his boast in the House of Commons 
that the interest of England was his shibboleth ; Lincoln thought 
always of mankind as well as of his own country, and served human 
nature itself. Palmerston, from his narrowness as an Englishman, 
did not endear his country to any one court or to any one people, but 
rather caused uneasiness and dislike ; Lincoln left America more be- 
loved than ever by all the peoples of Europe. Palmerston was self- 
possessed and adroit in reconciling the conflicting claims of the 
factions of the aristocracy ; Lincoln, frank and ingenuous, knew how 
to poise himself on the conflicting opinions of the people. Palmer- 
ston was capable of insolence towards the weak, quick to the sense 
of honor, not heedful of right ; Lincoln rejected counsel given only 
as a matter of policy, and was not capable of being willingly un- 
just. Palmerston, essentially superficial, delighted in banter and 
knew how to divert grave opposition by playful levity ; Lincoln was 
a man of infinite jest on his lips, with saddest earnestness at his 
heart. Palmerston was a fair representative of the aristocratic liber- 
ality of the day, choosing for his tribunal, not the conscience of 
humanity, but the House of Commons ; Lincoln took to heart the 
eternal truths of liberty, obeyed them as the commands of Providence, 



144 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

and accepted the human race as the judge of his fidelity. Palmer- 
ston did nothing that will endure ; his great achievement, the separa- 
tion of Belgium, placed that little kingdom where it must gravitate 
to France ; Lincoln finished a work which all time cannot overthrow. 
Palmerston is a shining example of the ablest of a cultivated aris- 
tocracy ; Lincoln shows the genuine fruits of institutions where the 
laboring man shares and assists to form the great ideas and designs 
of his country. Palmerston was buried in Westminster Abbey by 
the order of his queen, and was followed by the British aristocracy 
to his grave, which, after a few years, will hardly be noticed by the 
side of the graves of Fox and Chatham ; Lincoln was followed by 
the sorrow of his country across the continent to his resting-place in 
the heart of the Mississippi valley, to be remembered through all 
time by his countrymen, and by all the peoples of the world." 

The speeches of John Bright form exceptions to the average medi- 
ocrity of British oratory, but they are so familiar to this country that 
I need not quote from them. He probably stands at the head of 
Anglo-Saxon parliamentary orators. Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Dis- 
raeli rank as the finest running debaters. The writer and compiler 
of this book has heard the leading orators of both the Lords and 
the Commons declaim, but his personal verdict upon their rhetoric 
and their degree of ability would not, perhaps, have the same value 
to readers of different sympathies that English criticism itself might 
possess. I have therefore looked over the files of the Manchester, 
Dublin, and Glasgow newspapers, to glean some of the descriptions 
of English public men, which are so spicily written by their London 
correspondents, " many of whom," sa} r s Dr. Shelton Mackenzie, ed- 
itor of the " Philadelphia Press," himself a practised eye and hand in 
parliamentary literature, " are highly educated men, who generally 
are students in some of the Inns of Court, and will become lawyers 
in a few years. Lord Campbell, it is remembered, began his career 
in London as a reporter on the c Morning Chronicle/ and ended it as 
a peer and Lord Chancellor of England ; the late Sir James Dowling, 
Chief Justice of New South Wales, and Sir James Hannen, now a 
judge of the Court of Queen's Bench, also were newspaper reporters, 
and numerous other instances might be mentioned." 

This type of }'oung man is bound to attend every evening in the 
reporters' gallery of Lords' or Commons, and describe, as an eye- 
witness, the striking points of debates, and the manner, method, and 



HOUSES OF COMMONS AND OF HEPHE SENT ATI VES. 145 

appearance of members. This he does usually with great freedom, 
often with great ability. 

Here is a sketch of Lord Palmerston, Prime Minister of England 
during our civil war, and generally our enemy : — 

" Though for near sixty years he was a member of the House of 
Commons ; though of these he was forty-five in office, twenty-five 
in the cabinet, and seven at the head of the government, yet he 
seldom spoke on any great question of domestic interest, — Ireland, 
for example, with which his ties were unusually close, and his sym- 
pathies as earnest as it was in his nature to feel, — without remind- 
ing us that the impress of his thought was never stamped upon any 
great subject of home policy. He spoke, in his last year, of Irish 
emigration, in words exceedingly like those which he used on the 
same subject in 1828, and it is obvious that the question made little, 
if airy, progress in his mind from that day to his death." 

At the head of the Conservative or Tory party in the House of 
Lords was Lord Derby, the father of Lord Stanley, who negotiated 
the unpopular treaty on the Alabama claims with Mr. Reverdy John- 
son in 18G9. The Earl of Derby was no less our enemy than the 
ostensible " Liberal," Palmerston, and it may be interesting to know 
what stature and compass of man he was. In this we are assisted 
by the analytic mind of Mr. Grant, the veteran of the reporters' 
gallery : — 

" Of Lord Derby's vehement career as a reformer, while great 
abuses stared him in the face ; of his generous anti-slavery policy ; 
of his rash and violent personal collisions with Mr. O'Connell and Mr. 
Shiel ; of his superficial treatment of the Irish Church question, and 
his wish to relieve the grievances of Catholics without infringing the 
privileges of Protestants ; of his deepening conservatism as the cur- 
rent of liberal principles began to run stronger and deeper ; of his 
gallantry in adhering to his obsolete protectionist prejudices, even 
when Sir Robert Peel abandoned them ; of his pro-Austrian feeling 
when Austria was threatened by France and Italy ; of his pro- 
Southern feeling when the South (United States) was invaded by 
the North, — in all stages of his career alike Lord Derby's political 
motives have consisted very much of strong class-impulses and fas- 
tidious personal tastes, to which it is impossible to find any consist- 
ent intellectual clue. His political influence has chiefly arisen from 
sharing strongly the tastes and prejudices of a class, while possess- 
ing a literary feeling too large and refined to admit of his expressing 
19 



146 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

these prejudices in any gross or revolting way. A commonplace 
intellect and an imperious will, combined with more sensitive percep- 
tions and cultivated tastes than most of his order possess, have 
enabled him to throw these prepossessions into an effective, chivalric 
form, that has given them a weight they seldom deserved. And 
no nobleman of anything like Lord Derby's eminence has ever 
shown so little power of learning as he has done. His speech on 
assuming office in 1852, after the free-trade controversy had been 
discussed and decided for six years, was a model of dense economical 
ignorance, — almost of incapacity to think on such subjects at all." 

Scarcely in more complimentary terms is Lord Derby's son, 
Stanley, considered : — 

" Conservatism and radicalism," says Grant, " might, in a certain 
sense, really unite under Lord Stanley ; for conservatism would be 
gratified by the cold shoulder which he uniformly turns to imagina- 
tive or enthusiastic liberalism ; and radicalism would be gratified by 
the cold shoulder which he uniformly turns to sentimental or tradi- 
tional conservatism. Lord Stanley is as incapable of refusing a 
common-sense reform from any fear of the abstract danger of change 
as of joining in a demand for reform from any anticipation of Utopian 
benefits, or any chivalric devotion to abstract justice. Hence, he is 
what the chemists would call a neutral or earthy base." 

Lord Stanley is said to have once observed, " My father would 
be a very able man — if he knew anything ; " and Lord Derby, when 
asked why he had not sent his translation of the Iliad to his son, is 
rumored to have replied, that he was waiting till it should be printed 
in prose, and published in the form of a blue-book. 

The most dashing character in Parliament is Disraeli, a politician 
of Jewish descent, and of excellent literary attainments, about whose 
rank and character there is great diversity of opinion. In his face 
there is a dazzling, saucy look, which at once excites your interest. 
You see that, if not a great man, he is an intensely clever one ; and 
though, on reflection, 3^011 see more display than reality in his per- 
formance, and are not sure that he is in earnest, or that he 
means what he says, or that he is sustained and prompted by any 
great principle, you feel that as an orator he has few rivals. When 
he soars, as he occasional^ does, you tremble lest he should break 
down ; but Disraeli never attempts more than he can achieve ; and, 
when nearest to pathos, he saves himself by a happy flight ; but, 
even in his highest efforts, he preserves the same doggedly cool and 



HOUSES OF COMMONS AND OF REPRESENTATIVES. 147 

unconcerned appearance, and will stop to suck an orange, or, ac- 
tually (as he did in his great budget speech) , to cut his nails ! It is 
true there are times when he displa}^ a little more feeling. 

The conservative party in England never had a more illustrious 
nor more useful exemplar than Sir Robert Peel, the British Jefferson, 
the son of a cotton trader, and the abolisher of the corn laws, who died 
in 1850. He was a remarkably good-looking man, rather above the 
usual size, and finely proportioned. He was of a clear complexion, 
full, round face, and red-haired. His usual dress was a blue surtout, 
a light waistcoat, and dark trousers. He generally displayed a watch- 
chain on his breast, with a bunch of gold seals, of unusually large 
dimensions. " He can scarcely,'' says a contemporary, " be called a 
dandy, and yet he sacrifices a good deal to the graces. I hardly know 
a public man who dresses in better taste." This was when Peel was 
in the prime of life, being forty-seven years of age. His whole ap- 
pearance indicated health. His constitution was excellent, and his 
temperate habits seconded the kindly purposes of nature. He was 
capable of undergoing great physical fatigue, and, says an author, 
" I have known him to remain in the House for three or four suc- 
cessive nights till one and two o'clock, not only watching with the 
most intense anxiety the progress of important debates, but taking 
an active part in the proceedings, and yet be in his office, transacting 
business of the greatest moment, by ten o'clock on the following 
morning." 

In 1868 one hundred and ninety-two new private bills were intro- 
duced into the House of Commons, of which one hundred and seventy 
passed, — a fact which shows much less special legislation than the 
American Congress indulges in. Both bodies are huge manufactories 
of statute law. The pleasures of sitting in Parliament are highly 
appreciated by Englishmen. The spacious courts, cloisters, and 
promenades of the great building are free to a member. He can 
smoke his cigar on the river terrace, seeing vessels come and go, and 
the mighty mass of men and horses traversing Westminster Bridge. 
Near by is his club, where are the newspapers and serial literatures 
of the world at his disposal. He is beset with invitations to enter- 
tainments, made presiding officer and orator of city and suburban 
meetings, and when he returns to his district after Parliament adjourns 
he is received with ceremony and a banquet. But a working member 
of the House of Commons is quite as busy as any industrious con- 
gressman. The social world of London is much vaster than Wash- 



148 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. \ 

ington, and its allurements and seductions are more various. In 
London, Parliament is a mere episode of that gigantic life which con- 
denses into a city the riches and population of a nation. At Wash- 
ington, Congress is the city, and the city is little more than a deserted 
watering-place with the waiters retained after Congress has departed. 
The private vices of members of Commons are much the same as 
those of congressmen. There are profligate persons in both bodies. 
A prize-fighter has been seen seated in either legislature. When 
the national horse-race is held at Epsom Parliament adjourns. 

If we come to ask ourselves which body is the better one to repre- 
sent the people, we can best answer in the opinion of the people 
themselves. A few private voices are raised in America for qualified 
suffrage, limiting the ballot to intelligence, to property, to color, or 
to some other accident or inheritance. In England the demand for 
universal suffrage and equal chance to sit in Parliament is a formi- 
dable roar, with the passion of revolution in it. 

" I go further than Bright," said a young Englishman at South- 
ampton to me. " I want right ! " 

Wealth and democracy are the great elements of politics in this 
century, and it is more likely that we shall be debauched by the first 
than limited in the second. The agitation in England is the other 
way. Wealth constitutes the House of Commons, and democrac} r is 
undermining it. The House of Representatives is democratic beyond 
limitation, and only money can contend with numbers there. The 
abuse of representation in England is that a man can elect himself 
to Parliament. The abuse here is that a man can nominate himself 
for Congress. The corrupt Englishman buys the constituency. The 
corrupt American steals the machinery of nomination. If the Eng- 
lish Parliament is corrupt, there are millions of English people guiltless 
of it, because millions are disfranchised. If the American Congress 
is corrupt, an American cannot be guiltless, because all are electors. 
This government can only degenerate by default of interest in it, 
and, amongst the numberless schemes of law, not the least signifi- 
cant is one to compel every elector in America to deposit his vote. 

The effect of all the enginery of the century is to make the legis- 
lature absolutely popular. Even in the despotism of France every 
citizen votes for his representative in the lower house of the legisla- 
ture. Grudgingly and by degrees the English Parliament is popular- 
izing its constituencies. In 1832 the wicket was unlatched. In 1867 
the gates were set ajar. In a little while the gates will be thrown 



HOUSES OF COMMONS AND OF REPRESENTATIVES. 149 

wide open, and vote by ballot will be the means of sending represen- 
tative citizens to Parliament. Many agreeable old traditions must 
perish before this can be done. The "freeman" must become a 
citizen, the u borough " disappear in a district, the ancient privilege 
expire in the census. But these English laws will be the enactment 
of all Englishmen. Money will be assessed, not upon the back like 
a stripe, but upon the ground. The extravagant fiction of the 
monarch and his family must then be maintained by the virtues of 
the Princes, and even then it must, like every illusion, expire, if by 
nothing else, by its own self-respect. To be enshrined like a jewel- 
laden idol, complimented with a form of worship, made legally im- 
maculate, and dowered with money and attendants in profusion, this 
age is too practical and irreverent to continue this play when demo- 
cratic Parliaments come to be. 

The paying of salaries to legislators must come with popular Par- 
liaments. The state has no right even to a rich man's time without 
compensating him. As to the English custom of giving the executive 
government place in the Legislature, that has been proposed in Con- 
gress within a few years, and it is a question of no little importance. 
The English have found it wise and convenient. It brings the mag- 
istrate and the reformer together. The one feels the earnestness of 
the other, and communicates his knowledge in return. It makes 
falsehood in the speechmaker superfluous, and meets inquiry with 
promptitude. We must guess at a minister's intention in America. 
In England he is asked in Parliament to reveal it. 

The English Parliament, because of its want of representative 
character, is not up to the requirements of the nation. " What is 
there specially to admire in either House?" says the "Saturday 
Review," 1867 x "In the leaders of either there is an utter want of 
creative force. They cannot suggest anything, or do anything, or 
remedy anything ; they can only view things in the light of an edu- 
cated mind, and that comes to so very little. They have no motive 
power in themselves, and they receive none from the nation. They 
cannot give us an army, they cannot give us popular education, they 
cannot conciliate Ireland, they cannot do anything for the poor. 
Their intentions are admirable, and so is their public spirit ; but they 
are impotent." 



Y 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE PRIME MINISTER AND THE CABINET. 

Explanations of the executive governments of Great Britain and America. — Relative op- 
portunities for statesmanship. — Accounts of divers administrations and sketches of their 
methods of action in developing certain policies. — The prime minister and the president 
at home. — An English foreign minister and an American secretary of state correspond- 
ing with each other. — - Architecture of the executive departments in London and at 
Washington. — Party politics and public duty. — Salaries and perquisites of officials at 
home and abroad. 

The title of this chapter might have been " The Prime Minister 
and the President ; " for the President of England is, in fact, the 
Prime Minister, while the Queen's place is analogous to nothing here 
unless it be the fainter phantom that we call The People. We say 
The Sovereign People ; the English say The Sovereign ; and as the 
most practical nation must have some emblem, symbol, or personality 
to cherish in its emotions, we love our Flag where they love their 
Queen. "Our dear Queen !" cries the English child. " Our old 
Flag ! " say American boys going to battle. The American flag, ap- 
pealing to the sensuous and artistic part of our nature by the gorgeous- 
ness of its colors and the purity of its symbols, — the stars shining 
from the sky, — was one of the happiest suggestions of our fathers. 
It has had an influence in the state akin to the Cross in the Crusades, 
the Eagle to the Romans, or the Marsellaise Hymn to the French Re- 
publicans. 

It has been often said that the President of the United States has 
more power than the English Sovereign. The English Sovereign has 
personal influence, and there is great respect for her opinion. She is 
made rich and lives luxuriously, but she is without other power than 
this. The President of the United States is more powerful than an 
English Prime Minister, and this is probably what the above allega- 
tion means. The people's electors directly elect the President for a 
fixed term of years. If he becomes obnoxious to either the people 
or to Congress, there is no getting rid of him but by a vexatious trial, 
and during his term of oflace he has control of many thousand officials 

150 



THE PRIME MINISTER AND THE CABINET. 151 

whom he may coerce to his will. But the British Prime Minister can 
be changed at the will of the House of Commons, which meets annu- 
ally ; and in this respect lies the excellence of that form of govern- 
ment which is more immediately obedient to the Legislature than our 
own President. 

The Prime Minister is the Queen's responsible self; he who rules 
the realm in her name, and can be punished for her mistakes. She 
must put him aside when the House of Commons, by voting want of 
confidence in him, expresses that desire. Thus the Prime Minister is 
the Queen's manager sitting in Parliament. He stands at the rudder, 
and is the commander of the ship of State, but around him are the 
underwriters whom he must conciliate, and prove to them that his 
course is the true one. Being responsible, the Prime Minister dare 
not hold his place after he has been sufficiently rebuked by the votes 
of Commons. He therefore advises the Queen to send for the leader 
of the opposite political party, who becomes Prime Minister, and con- 
tinues on with the administration in the name of the Queen. 

Let us construct this form of government for America so as to make 
it palpable what would be the appearance of the United States with a 
Prime Minister at the head of it. 

Here is King Ulysses Grant to represent the Queen. He belongs 
to no political party, but sits in uniform at the top of the State, its 
hereditary ornament and sovereign, incapable of resigning, never to 
be elected out, not to be punished nor banished. He descended to 
us from his father, and his son " Buck," is to take his place inevi- 
tably. We derived him without our consent, and can onty expel 
him from his place by rebellion, which is high treason, and the pen- 
alty thereof death. In the early days of his family, two hundred or 
three hundred years ago, King Grant was his own minister and did 
as he pleased, spent our money with or without our consent, and put 
any of us whom he might dislike into the Tower, his jail. But being 
a lazy, luxurious tyrant, he found it convenient to rule us through 
some able favorite, a Cardinal, or a Duke. We could not dethrone 
the King, so we turned all our animosity upon his favorite minister, 
whom it was not high treason to hate, and in course of time this min- 
ister occupied so dangerous a place between the hate of the people and 
the freak of the King, that he was obliged to say to the King : — 

" Your majesty ! I cannot be your minister unless you keep within 
the law, for the people will hang me for executing your commands." 

The people, also, rose up against the Grants after a time, cut off 



152 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

the head of one King Grant, drove two others out of the country, and 
at last the King agreed that he would rule entirety through his minis- 
ters, who were, in turn, to rule according to the laws, and to be 
changed whenever the House of Commons wished. 

Now, there are two political parties in the country, and they have 
each sent to the House of Representatives as many members as they 
could elect relatively. The House of Representatives elects a Speaker. 
The two parties seat themselves on opposite sides of their legislative 
chamber, and some one sagacious and eloquent statesman becomes the 
leader of each party. This may be, for example, Mr. Thaddeus Ste- 
vens for the Radical party, and Mr. George Pendleton for the Con- 
servative party. The King, Grant, at once selects Mr. Stevens for 
his Prime Minister, because Mr. Stevens' party has the majority of 
members of the House of Representatives. He requests Mr. Stevens 
to form a Cabinet for him, which shall conduct the business of the 
nation, fill the executive offices, collect the revenue, and direct the 
policy of the State. Mr. Stevens can either eompty with this request 
or decline the honor, according to his opinion of his own capacity 
under the circumstances. 

We will suppose that Mr. Stevens accepts the place of Prime Min- 
ister. He looks round the country and through both Houses of Con- 
gress to discover the ablest men of his party whom he can obtain. 
There are, perhaps, seventy great offices to be filled ; but as seventy 
men would make an unwieldy Cabinet, only aboiio sixteen of the 
greatest officers are indicated for the Cabinet. Mr. Stevens makes 
himself the First Lord of the Treasury, and, perhaps also, the Chan- 
cellor of the Exchequer. He is known by the title of Prime Minister, 
or Premier. He takes the seals of office from the King, Grant, as the 
sign of his authority to rule in the King's name, and so selects his 
Cabinet that they will be popular with the House of Representatives 
as well as useful to the State. His own salary is twenty-five thou- 
sand dollars a year. As his Cabinet depends upon the will of Parlia- 
ment for its continuance, himself and several of his colleagues must 
also have seats in Parliament ; but to accomplish this they all require 
to be re-elected by their constituents. The government being formed, 
Mr. Stevens, or that member of the Cabinet who is the leader in the 
House of Representatives, begins work by recommending to the House, 
in the King's name, that they pass supply bills to carry on the coun- 
try, and estimates are suggested of the amount required for each de- 



THE PRIME MINISTER AND THE CABINET. 153 

partment. Mr. Stevens also writes the speech with which the King, 
Grant, opens Parliament. 

As in all politics to the victors belong the spoils, without which 
politics would have no selfish stimulus, Mr. Stevens puts his friends 
in all the great political offices, but he cannot, in the name of King 
Grant, do that which President Grant has the privilege of doing, — 
change all the clerks, laborers, and lackeys of the government. The 
opposition party, with Mr. Pendleton at its head, is jealous of Mr. Ste- 
vens and the Radicals, because they hold so many rich offices. There- 
fore every wily energy of the opposition is exerted to destroy the 
confidence of Parliament in the Cabinet. The Prime Minister must 
b£ ready to explain every troublous matter, and to convince Parlia- 
ment that the country is being well governed He brings up his 
annual " budget," to show the good state of the country financially, 
satisfies apprehensions about the foreign affairs of the State, explains 
why the cattle disease rages, and accounts for the Houses of Parlia- 
ment costing more than the original estimates. He also aims to bend 
Parliament to his political convictions, and, being a Radical, he wishes 
to extend the franchise to such Chinese, French, Africans, and Ital- 
ians as may be in the country. In this the House of Representatives 
is not up to his standard, and he loses some of the support of his 
party or of certain neutral members. Finally he is beaten by a de- 
cided vote, as he pushes his views. He is then bantered by Mr. Pen- 
dleton, and the other party with his failure, and asked why he does 
not give up the task of governing. He meets with an adverse vote 
once or twice more, and sees that he has lost the confidence of Par- 
liament. So he takes the seals of state back to the King, and resigns 
his place, saying : — 

" Sire (or, your Majesty), I advise you to send for Mr. Pendleton 
to make up a new ministry which will be acceptable to Parliament." 

Perhaps, however, Mr. Stevens may think that the people of the 
country are with him in opinion, and he may take the resolute step of 
advising the King to dissolve the Senate and House and order a new 
election of Representatives. If this election should confirm the sen- 
timents of Parliament, Mr. Stevens will have no alternative but to 
resign, and let Mr. Pendleton take possession of seals, offices, and 
honors. 

This is the English form of government, which I have thus supposi- 
titiously transferred to America. Let us now see the actual Cabinet 
which the President, the elected magistrate of the people, gathers 
20 



154: THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

around him. And here we come to a remarkable fact, which is this : 
that in neither America nor England is there any such organization 
as a Cabinet named or provided for by law. There is no record kept 
of the existence of either body, and in England the names of the 
Cabinet officers are known, but they are never announced officially. 
Each member of the Cabinet, as he is also an administrative officer 
of the State, is recognized in the latter capacity, but not as a Cabinet 
officer. Neither Parliament nor Congress ever prescribe when or 
where a Cabinet shall meet. It is a little conspirac}^ of great officers 
to divide the magistracy of the State ; and the word " cabal " is com- 
posed of the initials of the names of the members of a certain his- 
torical English Cabinet. For example, there is in England a First 
Lord of the Treasury, and in America a Secretary of the Treasury. 
These are recognized administrative officers. But when the Head of 
the Treasury, in either case, enters into secret council at Cabinet 
meeting, the law has no knowledge of such meeting. Congress or 
Parliament can request the Secretary of the Treasury to furnish it 
with information upon any branch of his department ; but he is never 
required to tell what happened in Cabinet meeting, or to disclose how 
opinion was divided there upon any subject. One leading English 
authority, Lord Chief Justice Campbell, has insisted, however, that 
the Cabinet, " by our Constitution, is in practice a defined and ac- 
knowledged body for carrying on the executive government of the 
country." 

The President of the United States is the Chief Magistrate by 
name and by act for a fixed term of four j^ears, charged with the 
execution of the laws, sworn to the defence of the Constitution, made 
Commander-in-Chief of the army and navy, and entrusted with the 
granting of pardons. He can only be removed by death, or convic- 
tion on impeachment, and, so far as we know, a President has never 
been anxious to resign. He is elected by the voters of each State 
going to the polls on a certain day, and casting ballots for electors. 
These electors meet together at a point in each State, and ballot sep- 
arately for President and Vice-President. They send detailed state- 
ments of the result to the President of the Senate, at Washington. 
Then, on a fixed day, the Senate and the House meet together, with 
the President of the Senate presiding, and in the presence of them 
all the statements are unsealed, and the ballots read. He who has 
the votes of the majority of the electors for President is declared 
President for the next four years. If there be no choice, the House 



THE PRIME MINISTER AND THE CABINET. 155 

of Representatives chooses by ballot a President from amongst the 
three names highest on the electors' lists, each State delegation cast- 
ing only one vote. If there should still be no person receiving a 
majority, the Vice-President becomes President. 

The new President, being inaugurated, selects his great officers of 
state within a day or two ; for his duties are so numerous and various, 
that he must have chief clerks over some of the important branches. 
These chief clerks bear the name of Secretaries, and must be 
appointed at once, because all the smaller clerkships should be filled 
by them. The Secretaries are called as follows, and are considered 
relatively honorable in this numerical rank : — 

1. The Secretary of State and of Foreign Affairs. 

2. The Secretary of the Treasury. 

3. The Secretary of War. 

4. The Secretary of the Navy. 

5. The Secretary of the Interior. 

6. The Postmaster- General. 

7. The Attorney-General. 

The names of these are sent in to the Senate, which, sitting with 
closed doors, and with a Secretary sworn to keep its secrets, consid- 
ers the nominations, and resolves, by a majority, either to confirm 
them, or to reject them. If confirmed, they remain the President's 
chief clerks during his will, and are paid a salary of about eight 
thousand dollars apiece, as clerks or Secretaries. 

Now begins their relation of Cabinet officers, which, as I have said, 
veils its existence from the laws of the land, or, in the words of an 
English statesman, Sir G. Cornewall Lewis, is " merely a voluntary 
meeting of certain ministers ; for the archives of the country con- 
tain no means of distinguishing between a Cabinet minister and any 
other." The President, having some public design upon his mind, 
finds that the execution of it will affect each of the seven great 
clerkships or " departments " of the government. It would be awk- 
ward to go visiting each Secretary, or to send for each one separately. 
So he calls them all together, and places his plans before them. 
Under some of the Presidents, executive acts are said to have been 
passed by the vote of the majority of the Cabinet. Under some of 
the more imperious Presidents, Cabinet councils were called between 
long intervals. General Garfield, a Representative in Congress, has 
said to me that Mr. Lincoln seldom called Cabinet meetings, and that 



156 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

his Secretary of the Treasury complained that the Cabinet was re- 
duced to a series of chief clerks. The Constitution of the nation 
says only this, hinting toward a Cabinet : " He (the President) may 
require the opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the 
executive departments, upon any subject relating to the duties of 
their respective offices." Besides being false syntax, this paragraph 
is in nothing explicit, as to the subject of the Cabinet, which keeps 
no Secretary, and therefore does no writing. 

The United States Cabinet Ministers meet in the office of the 
President, for the Cabinet has no existence without the Chief Magis- 
trate, and until 1868, when Congress enacted a bill, called the " Ten- 
ure-of-Office Law," the-right of the President to remove a Secretary 
was not disputed. Out of this law, and the alleged disregard of it 
arose our most memorable impeachment. 

While the relative harmony, intellect, and character of a Cabinet 
have no influence to change the duration of a President's term of 
office, they materially affect the popularity of his administration. 

We elect Presidents in America as a reward of signal services, 
more frequently in the field of war than on the plane of statesman- 
ship ; but we regard the choice of his Cabinet as frequently more vital 
to the country than his own character. Each Cabinet officer has, by 
our present regulations, the absolute power of removal and appoint- 
ment over the large body of lesser clerks and laborers in his depart- 
ment. In more important appointments the President sometimes 
interferes. But it is seldom that a new President has the mortifica- 
tion of seeing his Cabinet officers rejected by the Senate, however 
crude the selections may be. In 1869 the Senate even confirmed Mr. 
A. T. Stewart, of New York, for Secretary of the Treasury, when, 
by a law obsolete in the memory of men, it was discovered that his 
mercantile pursuits rendered him ineligible. The vast " patronage" 
of the President, in honors and offices, generally secures his earlier 
appointments respectful attention. 

In the English government the selection of a Cabinet is altogether 
a more delicate and important matter, for upon the strength of his 
Cabinet associates depends the political existence of the Prime Min- 
ister. In both countries a shrewd mixture of political and social 
notabilities is required to make an effective Cabinet, for the admin- 
istration must commend itself to the respect of the people, and also 
be equal to the tactics of its partisan opponents, who are not apt to 
be scrupulous. In America, also, it is esteemed impartial to consult 



THE P7JME MINISTER AND THE CABINET. 157 

geographical attachments, two Cabinet officers from one State often 
causing complaint. Personal favoritism also enters into the composi- 
tion of Cabinets, as it is natural that the President should wish one 
or two trusted friends at his side. President Jackson brought Major 
Eaton, his neighbor, to Washington, and raised him to a minister- 
ship, much to the annoyance of his Cabinet, as I shall relate here- 
after. General Grant made his townsman and chief-of-staff, General 
Eawlins, Secretary of War. The majority of each Cabinet being 
politicians, intrigues not uncommonly begin within the Cabinet circle 
with the intent to affect the succession to the President or Prime 
Minister. Instances of this sort occur in recent administrations of 
both America and England. 

There are two or three remarkable coincidences between the office 
of President and that of Prime Minister. The first is in the average 
duration of their terms of office. In one hundred and fifty } T ears, or 
from 1715 to 1866, there were thirty-eight Prime Ministers for Eng- 
land, — an average term of three years and eight months, which is 
nearly the exact period between the inauguration of one President, 
and the election of his successor. Again, the salaiy of both Presi- 
dent and Prime Minister is the same. Neither of them is directly 
elected by the people, the source of power in America, nor appointed 
by the Sovereign, the source of power in England. In one case the 
electors intervene, in the other, Parliament must be satisfied. The 
House of Commons can terminate the career of a minister, by voting 
want of confidence in him, and the House of Representatives can 
impeach a President, and with the concurrence of two-thirds of the 
Senate, remove him. Both President and Prime Minister represent a 
political party. Both are the dispensers of the great offices of the 
State. If a Chief Justice dies during the administration of a certain 
Premier, the latter, like the President, fills the place. Both offices 
are the pinnacle of political ambition in their several countries. 
To either office the most popular or the ablest statesman is generally 
elevated by his party, although it frequently happens that some com- 
paratively obscure gentleman, or some soldier merely, slips past a 
more formidable colleague. Instances of this sort in America were 
General Harrison passing over the head of Hemy Clay, Mr. Polk 
anticipating Mr. Van Buren, and Mr. Lincoln outstripping Mr. Sew- 
ard. Analogous cases in England were the administrations of the 
Earl of Aberdeen, in 1852, and, previously, of the Duke of Welling- 
ton, of whom Miss Martineau says : — 



158 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

" All that had been previously surmised of the Duke of Welling- 
ton's unfitness for civil government seemed orally confirmed by him- 
self, and he was formally deposed in the accustomed way, by a major- 
ity of the House of Commons voting against him. Next day brought 
the glad tidings of his resignation. ,, 

The English Cabinet, in the summer of 1866, consisted of these 
officers, fifteen in number : — 

1. First Lord of the Treasury.— "Earl of Derby; sixty-seven years old. Sal- 

ary, twenty-five thousand dollars. He was also Prime Minister, or 
Premier, and appointed, as his colleagues, the members of the Cabinet 
succeeding. 

2. Lord High Chancellor. — Lord Chelmsford ; seventy-four years old. Sal- 

ary, fifty thousand dollars. The best-paid officer in England. He cor- 
responds in some degree to our Vice-President, being President of the 
House of Lords. 

3. Ijord President of the Council. — Duke of Marlborough ; forty-six years 

old. Salary, ten thousand dollars a year. He controls the de- 
partment of education, and attends the Queen at the council table. 
He belongs to the Privy Council, which formerly managed the country 
jointly with the Sovereign. 

4. Lord Privy Seal. — Earl of Malmesbury ; sixty-one years old. This offi- 

cer keeps the Sovereign's private seal, and was formerly of high au- 
thority in the State, but the privy seal is of little note nowadays, and 
the office is little more than honorary. 

5. Chancellor of the Exchequer. — Right Hon. Benjamin Disraeli ; sixty-three 

years old. Salary, twenty-five thousand dollars a year, and the second 
officer in importance in the Cabinet. He is the English Secretary of 
Treasury. 

6. Secretary of State for the Home Department. — Right Hon. Gathorne 

Hardy; fifty- four years old. This officer is the head of the government 
police and militia, and is entrusted with the maintenance of the public 
security. He renders up fugitive criminals from the United States. 

7. Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. — Lord Stanley; forty-two years 

old ; son of Earl Derby, the Prime Minister. He is the nominator of 
Ambassadors and Consuls, issues passports, negotiates treaties, and 
keeps England in correspondence with all foreign governments. This 
office concerns us more than any other Cabinet position in England. 

8. Secretary of State for the Colonies. — Duke of Buckingham; forty-five 

years old. This officer, like all the five Secretaries of State, receives 
twenty-five thousand dollars a year, and has charge of the immense 
colonial possessions of England. We have a Secretary of the Interior, 
who corresponds to him in some degree. 

9. Secretary of State for India. — Sir Stafford Northcote ; fifty years old. 

The English Empire in India is so vast and so important, that the cus- 
tody of it is entrusted to a special Cabinet officer. 



THE PRIME MINISTER AND THE CABINET. 159 

10. Secretary of State for War. — Right Hon. Sir John Parkington ; sixty- 

nine years old. This officer is, in all material respects, the counterpart 
of our Secretary of War. 

11. First Lord of the Admiralty. —Right Hon. Henry Thomas Lowry Corry ; 

sixty-five years old. This officer is the English Secretary of the Navy, 
and he has a wider jurisdiction than the American Secretary, the Brit- 
ish Navy being perpetual, and of monstrous size. 

12. President of the Board of Trade. —Duke of Richmond; fifty years old. 

Salary, ten thousand dollars. The commerce, railways, and commer- 
cial statistics of England, being of vital consequence, are intrusted to 
a special Cabinet officer. 

13. Postmaster General. — Duke of Montrose ; sixty-nine years old. Salary, 

twelve thousand five hundred dollars a year. He has control of fifteen 
thousand offices, and dispenses three millions of dollars a year. 

14. Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. —Right Hon. Colonel John Wilson 

Patten ; sixty-six years old. An honorary appointment, mainly, with 
a salary of ten thousand dollars, and filled by a statesman of rank. 
The Duchy of Lancaster is a bit of private interest of the Queen's, 
which yields her sixty thousand dollars a year. 

15. President of the Poor Law Board. — Earl of Devon; sixty-one years old. 

Salary, ten thousand dollars. The custodian of the mighty pauper es- 
tablishment of England ; the most extraordinary feature of the king- 
dom, not excepting its shipping. 

By running over the Cabinet list above, it will be seen to be ex- 
actly twice the size of the American Cabinet, excluding the Prime 
Minister. These fifteen officers govern England with the support of 
the House of Commons. Yet, though dependent for their political 
existence upon the Commons, nine of them are seen to be peers, and 
one is a baronet. This conclusive evidence of the subserviency of 
all powers in England to the aristocracy is made the subject of satire 
by the German writer on the English constitution, Dr. Fischel, who 
quotes from Bulwer, "Could the king choose a Cabinet out of men 
unknown to the aristocracy ? Assuredly not ! The aristocratic party 
in the two houses would be in arms ! What a commotion there would 
be ! Imagine the haughty indignation of my Lords Grey and Har- 
rowby ! What a ' prelection ' we should receive from Lord Brougham 
' deeply meditating these things.' Alas ! the King's ministry would 
be out the next day, and the aristocracy's ministry, with all due 
apology, replaced." 

The main features of this chapter, which is directed like the entire 
book toward satisfying curiosity rather than making disquisitions, 
will be : — 

1. An account of the origin of Cabinets. 



160 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

2. Some scenes in Cabinet meetings at home and abroad. 

3. Sketches of certain administrations in England. 

The Sovereign of England is traditionally the possessor of certain 
inherited and inalienable absolute powers called prerogatives. The 
earliest Kings of England were unrestrained tyrants, until the barons 
forced them to consent to certain restrictions of their arbitrary power. 
When James the First, who reigned during the settlement of Virginia, 
was on his way from Scotland to be crowned in London, he had 
a thief hanged up at a town of Newark, through which he passed, 
merely to show " that he was God's representative, and had a right 
to place himself above all law." His son, Charles I., in whose reign 
New England and many of the other States were settled, declared 
"that he was responsible to God alone for his acts." Down to the 
time of the expulsion of James II., a hundred and eighty years ago, 
the monarch of England surrounded himself at pleasure with a few 
confidential advisers, called Privy Councillors. This body, the Privy 
Council, exists yet in England, but its former importance is di- 
minished, and the Cabinet, which was formed out of a faction in it, or, 
as w r e would say, by a " corner" in it, is now nearly absolute. 
There are at this time probably a hundred or two hundred Privy 
Councillors, and they are all entitled by this appointment to be 
called "Eight Honorable." Being Privy Councillors, they have ac- 
cess under certain regulations to the Queen's presence ; but only those 
sit at her Privy Council table who are specially summoned. In 
America the great body of honorable and influential citizens who can 
have access to the President may be considered his Privy Council, and 
this includes whoever is worthy, and w r ho is requested by the President 
to give him information or suggestions. When President Grant 
called in the Quakers to advise him about Indian affairs, they w T ere 
of his Privy Council, in the English sense. In England the majority 
of Privy Councillors are peers, and the members of the Cabinet are 
almost invariably attached to this effete body, which, however, has a 
few duties left to it, and certain committee work to do. We have 
reason to remember it, for the celebrated " Orders in Council " passed 
during the French and English wars in 1806, to the annoyance of our 
ship-owners. For thirty years there has been no meeting en masse of 
this large Privy Council, which is one of those cumbrous and useless 
appendages to a useless monarch, embarrassing the study of the 
English constitution, and accomplishing no good to man nor to the 
nation. 



THE PRIME MINISTER AND THE CABINET. 1G1 

Looking back over the later days of the Privy Council we have no 
reason to wonder that it was overthrown by a small minority within 
it. Clarendon, the Lord Chancellor of Charles II. was one of the last 
of the great councillors, and he was impeached of high treason on the 
ground of common fame, without the examination of witnesses by the 
Commons ; upon which the Lords resolved that he could not be com- 
mitted in the absence of any special charge of treason. The articles 
of impeachment, which were seventeen in number, might have been 
drawn closer, and several transactions of Clarendon been more fully 
known, as subsequently revealed. There is good reason for believing 
that he was the principal adviser of a standing army to be raised and 
maintained by a forced contribution, and of the corrupt sale of Dun- 
kirk to the French King. In his secret correspondence with the 
French court, he betraj^ed state matters, which it was the interest of 
the country should be concealed ; and was not only himself a traitor, 
but made the King a similar delinquent, by soliciting money from the 
King of France to. minister to the licentious profusion of his own 
Sovereign. Clarendon was thus guilty of the enormous iniquity of 
rendering a lavish Prince dependent on the wages of a foreign power, 
to enable him to elude the control of Parliament. Avarice was his 
flagrant vice ; and it was observed by Evelyn, who was friendly 
towards the Chancellor, that he " never would nor did do anything 
but for money." He had, too, the weakness of ostentation ; built a 
large house — Dunkirk House, it was called from its surmised origin 
— of unparalleled magnificence, storing it with choice pictures and 
furniture, that excited the surprise of all who remembered his recent 
poverty. Parliament felt so strongly hostile to him, that Charles 
declared his inability to protect him, and advised his withdrawal from 
the kingdom. This advice he adopted, and on a dark November 
night he escaped to France. He was old and infirm, vastly proud 
withal, and, after bearing his misfortunes with little dignity, died in 
exile seven years after. In those days the Privy Council chamber 
was also a torture chamber. 

After the Stuarts were expelled in 1688, a section of the Privy 
Council took charge of the State, and, with a single exception, Eng- 
land has been governed by a Prime Minister and Cabinet ever since. 
The exception was on the death of Queen Anne, the year after South 
Carolina was settled, when the Cabinet had resolved to restore the 
Stuarts to the English throne. Two Dukes of the Privy Council 
strode into the Cabinet meeting, and a general meeting of the Privy 
21 



162 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

Council was summoned, so that, despite the treason of the Cabinet, 
the Hanoverian succession and the era of Victoria was ensured. 

The English Sovereign does not attend Cabinet meetings, and there- 
fore the Prime Minister rules in her name, doing pretty much as he 
pleases, consonant with the support of the House of Commons. This 
custom began with George I., who could not speak English, and he 
therefore kept away from the Cabinet. In former days when a 
minister ruled adversely to the House he lost his head. Now he only 
loses his official head. Ministers are not responsible for their acts 
in these days, although they make great show of responsibility. 

To make this subject as plain as possible I propose to compare the 
material features of the official life of a Prime Minister with the same 
features of the life of an American President. And first, the begin- 
ning of an administration. 

In 1868 General Grant was elected President. On the fourth of 
March, more than three months afterward, he was inaugurated. The 
author was a witness of this state ceremony, and it was pronounced 
the finest pageant of its sort ever seen at the capital of the republic. 
Multiplied ways of travelling, increased speed, low excursion fare, 
and a more nomadic and inquisitive spirit, augment the visiting 
crowds to Washington city every four years, so that it is wise to say 
that each quadrennial inauguration is more extraordinary than the 
previous one. When Jefferson was inaugurated, as has been often 
told, there was no procession ; the President, in a homespun suit, — the 
best " protection " to American industry, — rode unattended on his nag 
to the Capitol, and hitched his horse to the palings outside. Within, 
he took the oath of inauguration in calm dignity, uttering an address, 
which, for concise, clear statement, and frank expression of great 
truths only yet half popularized, far exceeded the literary merits of 
his Declaration of Independence. After Jefferson, the government 
became gradually more federalized ; and Jackson, fond of personal 
parade, made his inaugurations triumphal receptions. Harrison and 
Taylor, being military heroes, got the dramatic support of the military 
spirit. Then the inaugurations were partisan merely, down to 
Lincoln, when the North showed its enthusiasm. At last we have 
come to Grant, and to his inauguration came representatives from 
thirty-five millions of people. The contiguous State of Pennsylvania 
alone is now almost as populous as the republic of Washington, and 
the neighboring city of Baltimore — only one hour from the capital 
" — is as large as all the great American cities, in 1776. Of course 



THE PRIME MINISTER AND THE CABINET. 163 

the inauguration was a great gathering, by physical as well as sym- 
pathetic reasons. It was an entirely hearty inauguration, the testi- 
monial of intellect to modest}', and not, like that of Lincoln, a turn- 
out of drollery to see " Old Abe ; " or like that of Harrison, a pan- 
tomime of " Hard Cider." I saw here the most distinguished Ameri- 
cans, and if Gen. Grant had been a Protestant Bishop, he could not 
have been spoken of with more heartfelt respect. No grisly humor 
attached to him ; no nickname gave him fictitious popularity. He 
refused to let the light of military victory shine upon him, and in his 
unobtrusive manner he came shyly with a friend to the Senate 
Chamber and read his little speech, and again withdrew to duty. It 
is only a high plane of citizenship that can appreciate such silent 
character, and every eye that quietly looked upon Grant riding on the 
avenue was a .huzza without passion. The age of hero-worship 
seemed to have expired, and that of business to have begun. 

Did you ever go to one of the modern Sunday night preachings in 
a theatre ? There is a mixed audience come to the worship of nov- 
elt} T ; the gilt and mirrors and fictitious laces round the private boxes 
shine and shimmer, and down through the painted scenes comes a 
preacher with a Bible, and says : — 

" Let us pray ! " 

So seemed to me this inauguration, all spangled with triumph, as 
Grant came to his people and asked strength to do his simplest and 
best. No rhetoric, no gesture, no " deportment," nothing of the 
French melodramatic, nor of the old Pagan Republic, but a revival 
of Jefferson, without Jefferson's idealisms. The President-elect rode 
to the Capitol with Gen. Rawlins, his Galena townsman. Two good 
nags drew his carriage. A long procession went before and behind. 
He subscribed to the civil forms of the occasion, bowing to the popu- 
lar salutations, and his dress was plain black, without a tittle of the 
soldier in it. There was much music, ringing of bells, banners, and 
huzzas ; but the intensest study was the shy little man in the car- 
riage, without a flush on his face, but with deep, reflective marks 
there, made by poverty and war. When he arrived at the Capitol, he 
found the top, the stairs, the projections, the balustrades, the abut- 
ments of that large marble edifice as full of people as a candy capitol 
might be of flies. The area before the Capitol was clear, save of a 
few ; but in the park beyond, the trees were full of clinging human 
fruit, and between the huge sitting-statue of Washington and the eye 
a silent, orderly multitude looked up to where the long fagade of the 



164 THE NEW WOULD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. < 

Capitol projected its three great porticoes. The middle portico was 
the focus of all rays of light, of music, of attention. Two long 
flags drooped down the central Corinthian columns, and between them 
burst the peal of invisible drums beaten in the rotunda. From the 
bases of these columns fell a temporary flight of stairs to a platform 
railed, and draped in colors. This was all, except the stately build- 
ing reaching to the clouds, and the peering, tiptoe multitude on 
trees, fences, carriages, and house-tops, while amongst the mass on 
frail scaffolding of timber, photography, like a carrier pigeon 
perched, to seize the spectacle, and fly down the generations with it. 
Grant alighted in presence of all these, and with Senator Cragin, of 
New Hampshire, a gentleman, with large, baldish, florid forehead, 
he walked out of the view of the people, they huzzaing. The Senate 
was a packed mass of ladies in the galleries, and on the floor folks 
of distinction, amongst them the gold-fringed, sworded, cocked-hat- 
ted members of foreign legations. The new Vice-President, Col- 
fax, made a little speech, and the retiring Vice-President, Mr. Wade, 
went out of what is called active life. Grant entered the Senate, 
with his usual shy unconsciousness, bowed to the chair, and sat 
awhile, suffering examination. When the time came to go before the 
people, he was prompt and sedate. The procession moved deliber- 
ately through the long lobby and aisle to the rotunda, where the band 
of music made the iron ribs of the dome overhead tingle, and, filing 
to the left, the President-elect walked into the da}dight, descended 
the flight of stairs, and stood before the roaring, surging people. 
There were the judges in their long, black robes, to administer the 
oath of office ; there was his wife, happiest joy of all, her love and con- 
fidence crowned in this, — poverty appeased and obscurity vindicated ; 
there she stood amongst her relatives, by her father, and her sister's 
husband, with her pride too big not to beam except for tears ; — there 
was everybody of honorable descent, talent, or station, and the air 
was full of glad salutations, the people saying for the moment un- 
selfishly : — 

" Hail, our accepted one ! " 

The music throbbed its last ; the huzzas ceased ; the General took 
the oath of office to Chief Justice Chase, with his arm and spread 
hand lifted, He looked up to the large presence of the Chief Justice, 
burnt by the fire of battle — the Judge possessed by gentler inspira- 
tions. All grave and grand allegory was depicted in their two 
figures, — the burning torch of the wilderness was inverted, and the 



THE PRIME MINISTER AND THE CABINET. 165 

slayer without a sword took the oath of peace. Together they stood, 
who came to these two magistracies by different roads, — the younger 
man by the harder and the wearier route, — one taking all the dignities 
of the other ; and now, that the conflict of their ambition is over, 
how like they are in wishes, in wisdoms ! The one by the study of 
books, the other by the study of active life, stand now upon the same 
results, both progressive, both conservative, and probably mutual 
admirers'. General Grant drew forth his speech carefully, and folded 
it back, wetting his finger at his lip. Then he read in a quiet way, 
audible near b}^, no further; and while he did so his daughter was 
passed to his side, and she put her hand upon his arm as if to sup- 
port him. So he stood, strengthened by childhood, looking into the 
multitude and pronouncing his designs, like the captain of a ship 
plunging out of battle into storm. 

The President then rode to the White House, his official residence, 
at the head of the procession of firemen, soldiers, political clubs, 
militia, and mounted citizens. He found this building ready for his 
occupation, having been evacuated the previous day by the former 
President. That night he completed the list of his Cabinet, and next 
day sent it to the Senate, which, sitting with closed doors, confirmed 
it. The same day, or a day or two afterwards, there was a Cabinet 
meeting, and a new American administration had fairly commenced. 

Let us now turn to England and describe the inauguration of Sir 
Robert Peel, the first Prime Minister elected in the reign of Queen 
Victoria. 

When the girl Queen came to the throne, she found the Whig party 
in power, with Lord Melbourne Prime Minister. The Queen's 
childish associates and her family had all been Whigs in feeling, and, 
knowing little of politics, she threw herself, with all a woman's 
fervor, upon the Whig side. Her household was filled, according to 
custom, with ladies chosen from the great Whig families, and these, 
being almost as wily politicians as their husbands and fathers, made 
the Queen an enthusiast in their cause. She disliked the name of 
"Tory" or "Conservative," — the latter word being a liberalized 
form of the former, — and was particularly opposed to the leading 
conservative statesmen. In the enjoyment of the society of her dis- 
tinguished and obliging household, the young girl seemed to have no 
apprehension of any violent change in her confidantes dependent 
upon the whim of politicians, or the exigencies of state. This was 
to be part of her destiny, however ; for in 1839, Lord Melbourne, 



166 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

the Whig Prime Minister, announced in the upper house, a fact 
long patent, that the Whig ministry did not possess the confidence 
of Parliament, and that they had resigned. 

But an unexpected determination of the Queen arrested the popu- 
lar judgment and restored them to power. Her Majesty refused to 
dismiss the ladies of her household, considering them probably not 
politicians of any party. This, however, Sir Robert Peel made an 
indispensable concession ere he would undertake to form a new 
ministry ; and the Queen, not acquiescing, and resorting to the 
advice of Lord John Russell, a Whig who approved her determina- 
tion, the old whig ministry was reinstated. A Cabinet Council 
mooted the point in dispute, and agreed that the constitutional usage 
of changing the servants of the royal household on a change of min- 
istry extended only to those who were members of Parliament, not 
to ladies. Parliament appears to have acquiesced in the ministerial 
version of the prerogative, being doubtless reluctant, if dissentient, 
to press an adverse construction on a question so personal to a girl- 
ish sovereign. It had the effect of prolonging the existence of the 
ministry for two years longer, though the votes of the Commons had 
designated its incompetence to administer the affairs of the nation. 
There is little doubt that, in a constitutional point of view, the 
Queen was wrong, and was made the instrument of the wily Whigs. 
Besides this, she was blunt with Sir Robert Peel, and told him that 
she entirely approved of the conduct of the retiring ministers. The 
Queen lived to regret her folly, and Peel had the satisfaction in two 
years more of seeing the country sustain him. The Whigs were 
routed, and a change of ministers became compulsory. The Queen, 
meantime, had been married, and, under the discipline of a hus- 
band, had learned to leave state affairs entirely to the Cabinet, so 
that when Sir Robert Peel came to the palace a second time, obedient 
to her summons, she was resigned to lose her old acquaintances 
of four years, from the Mistress of the Robes, who may be called the 
Female Prime Minister of the household, down to the Ladies of the 
Bedchamber. 

Scarcely a word was spoken at the dinner-table, when the Queen 
took her last meal with her old household, and, when she was with 
ladies afterwards, tears and regrets broke forth with little restraint ; 
these were natural and amiable. It was no fault of hers — nor 
of theirs — that their connection was made dependent on the state of 
political parties ; the blame rested elsewhere, though the suffering 



THE PRIME MINISTER AND THE CABINET. 167 

was with them. Everybody pitied the young sovereign, and saw and 
felt the hardship ; but there were many who looked forward cheer- 
fully to an approaching time when she would know a new satisfaction 
in reposing upon an administration really strong, efficient, and sup- 
ported by the country, and on a household composed of persons 
among whom she could make friends without the fear of their 
removal from any other cause than her wish, or their own. 

Somewhat resembling the above is the scene between Mr. Duane, 
Secretary of the United States Treasury, and President Andrew 
Jackson. The latter wanted to use the former for a partisan object, 
and Mr. Duane would neither be used, nor would he resign, but 
insisted upon being dismissed by the President. The Secretary gives 
the following as part of the conversation Jackson had with him : — 

" President. — ' I suppose you mean to come out against me?' 

" Secretary. — i Nothing is further from my thoughts ; I barely 
desire to do what is now my duty ; and to defend myself if assailed 
hereafter.' 

" President. — c You have been, all along, mistaken in your views. 
Here is a paper that will show you your obligations ; that the execu- 
tive must protect you.' 

" Secretary. — ' I will read it, sir, if such is your wish ; but I can- 
not anticipate a change of opinion/ 

"President. — 'A secretary, sir, is merely an executive agent, a 
subordinate, and you may say so in self-defence.' 

"Secretary. — ' In this particular case, Congress confers a discre- 
tionary power, and requires reasons if I exercise it. Surely, this 
contemplates responsibility on my part.' 

"President. — 'This paper will show you that your doubts are 
wholly groundless.' 

" Secretary. — ' As to the deposits, allow me, sir, to say my de- 
cision is positive. The only question is the mode of my retire- 
ment.' 

" President. — ' My dear Mr. Duane, we must separate as friends. 
Far from desiring that you should sustain any injury, } t ou know I 
have intended to give you the highest appointment now in my gift. 
You shall have the mission to Russia. I would have settled this 
matter before but for the delay or difficulty ' (as I understood Mr. 
President), k in relation to Mr. Buchanan.' 

" Secretary. — ' I am sincerely thankful to you, sir, for your kind 



168 THE HEW WORLD COMPAKED WITH THE OLD. 

disposition, but I beg you to serve me in a way that will be truly 
pleasing. I desire no new station, and barely wish to have my 
present one blameless, or free from apprehension as to the future. 
Favor me with a written declaration of your desire that I should 
leave office, as I cannot carry out your views, as to this (deposits), 
and I will take back this letter.' 

"President. — 'Never have I had anything that has given me 
more mortification than this whole business. I had not the smallest 
notion that we could differ.' " 

Afterwards the President sent a note to Mr. Duane, which con- 
cluded with the well-known words, " I feel myself constrained to 
notify you, that your further services, as Secretary of the Treasury, 
are no longer required." 

To proceed with the installation of Sir Robert Peel as Prime 
Minister: Parliament opened; the two leaders of the rival parties, 
Russell and Peel, met each other cordially in the House of Com- 
mons, and shook hands. When the Commons went up to the Lords' 
chamber, it was found that the Queen's speech was read by permis- 
sion, as she had declined to open Parliament herself, on account of 
the partisan character of the speech which had been composed for 
her by the old Whig ministers retiring ; also, perhaps, because she 
felt somewhat ashamed of her self-will two years before. The first 
votes taken in both houses showed that the Whig ministry could not 
work harmoniously with either body. In a few days a Whig minister 
in each house declared that the ministers had resigned their offices. 
Then the old ministers, in plain clothes, took carriages, and drove 
up to the Queen's palace. A great crowd stood around the gate, 
cheering, groaning, laughing at the retiring administration ; and the 
dejected ministers, being formally introduced into the presence of 
the Queen, delivered up their seals of office. In a short time, the 
victorious new ministers drove up in splendid state coaches, and 
were cheered with the greatest enthusiasm by the crowd. They were 
obliged to wait until the Queen had taken an affectionate leave from 
the old ministers. Finally, Sir Robert Peel, the new Prime Minister, 
for whom the Queen had sent by the advice of his rival, was admitted 
to see Victoria, and she gave him her hand to kiss. The Duke of 
Wellington, who was to be a colleague of Peel's, was also admitted, 
with three or four other members of the incoming Cabinet, and they 
all reverently kissed the Queen's hand. The Queen and her husband 



ME PRIME MIMSTEH AND THE CABINET. 169 

then went to another apartment, and organized a formal meeting of 
the Privy Council. The members of the new Cabinet came in and 
took the oath of Privy Councillors " to advise the Queen according 
to the best of their cunning and discretion ; to advise for the Queen's 
honor and the good of the iDiiblic without partiality through affection, 
love, meed, doubt, or dread ; to keep the Queen's counsel secret, to 
avoid corruption, to help and strengthen the execution of what shall 
be resolved ; to withstand all persons who would attempt the con- 
trary ; and to observe, keep, and do all that a good and true coun- 
cillor ought to do to his sovereign lady the Queen." 

After taking the oaths, the new Cabinet took lunch with the Queen 
and the rest of the Privy Council, and high-bred conversation upon 
state topics was indulged in, every effort being made to conciliate 
the shy young Queen, particularly by the new Tory young ladies of the 
household, her ancient aversion, whom the Ministry had also intro- 
duced to her. These she was now compelled to accept for her every- 
day attendants and acquaintances, not mistress of her own house- 
hold, though a Queen. Everybody was very stately and deferential 
to her nevertheless, and at last the new Cabinet withdrew masters of 
the state so long as the Commons should agree to leave them there. 
The new ladies of the household were left behind ; for now the palace 
was their home. Immediately the Whigs vacated some sixty great 
offices of government, and Peel and the Tories possessed themselves 
of them. Sir Robert Peel, master of the situation, now took his 
place in the House of Commons, on the front bench, to the right of 
the Speaker. A new Lord Chancellor presided over the peers, and 
the Duke of Wellington took the ministerial bench in that house. 
Crowds were in attendance on all these occasions to see the cere- 
mony of installation of a new government ; the streets were full of 
pictures of the new Cabinet ministers, and in Parliament the late 
ministry began to assail the new. 

Amusement for observers was afforded on the revolution in the 
ministry in seeing the eminent men of the country change seats on 
the reassembling of Parliament. The new Tory ministers had lost 
no seats in the process of their re-election ; and they, therefore, as- 
sembled their whole number. Some of the Whigs went over and 
occupied the front benches of opposition ; some seemed at a loss 
where to place themselves after having sat in the same seats for ten 
years, with only a short interval. One or two members, too radical 
to belong to any party, would not move, but sat composedly among 
22 



170 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

the Tories. The next interest for strangers was in hearing the 
Prime Minister's statement as to how the new government meant to 
proceed. The Chancellor of the Exchequer arose and said he must 
ask a vote of twelve million five hundred thousand dollars to carry 
on the new government. With this large grant requested, the new 
government was fairly installed and thrown upon the resources of its 
own ability and the support of its party. 

The same is the procedure at the present time. The Queen reigns ; 
the Prime Minister rules ; the House of Commons, holding the purse- 
strings of the monarchy, dismisses Prime Ministers at will. If the 
Prime Minister holds to his dangerous eminence, despite repeated 
warnings from the tellers of Commons, revolution is imminent. The 
Prime Minister may prorogue Parliament, or he may dissolve it and 
demand a new election, but in the end he must yield to public 
opinion, and the Queen, for her own safety's sake, must bid him 
good-b} r . 

I have given an instance of the Queen's disagreement with a Prime 
Minister. To show another curious instance of the jealousy with 
which the Cabinet watch the Queen's movements, we may cite the 
incident of Victoria visiting King Louis Phillippe, of France, in 1843, 
as expressed in the diary of a Mr. Raikes, a bosom-friend of the 
Duke of Wellington : — 

u I went down," says Raikes, " to Walmer Castle, and found the 
Duke walking with Mr. Arbuthnot on the ramparts, or, as it is 

called, the platform, which overlooks the sea After the 

company had departed, at ten o'clock, I sat up with the Duke and 

Arbuthnot till twelve o'clock talking on various topics. I 

see that the government was evidently opposed to the Queen's visit, 
to Eu, in France. It was a wily intrigue managed by Louis Phil- 
lippe, through the intervention of his daughter, the Queen of the 
Belgians, during her frequent visits to Windsor with King Leopold, 
and was hailed by him with extreme joy, as the first admission of the 
King of the Barricades within the pale of legitimate sovereigns. The 
Duke said, ' I was never let into the secret, nor did I believe the 
report then in circulation, till at last they sent to consult my opinion 
as to forming a regency during the Queen's absence. I immediately 
referred to precedents as the only proper guide. I told them that 
George I., George II. (George III. never went abroad), and George 
IV. had all been obliged to appoint councils of regency ; that Henry 
III., when he met Francis I., at Andres, was then master of Calais, 



THE PRIME MINISTER AND THE CABINET. 171 

as also when he met Charles V., at Gravelines ; so that in these 
instances, Calais being a part of his dominions, he hardly did more 
than pass his frontier, — not much more than going from one county 
to the next. Upon this I decided that the Queen could not quit this 
county without an Act of Regency. But she consulted the crown 
lawyers, who decided that it was not necessary, as courtiers would 
do/ I myself (resumes Raikes) did not believe in her going till 
two days before she went. Peel persisted afterwards that he had 
told me of it ; but I knew I never heard it, and it was not a thino- to 
have escaped me if I had." 

This will be curious reading for many Americans, who suppose that 
a Queen is guardian of all her private movements, and is not only 
absolute in her own realm, but free to visit every other. Few per- 
sons would think of questioning the movements of an American 
President, and an English Prime Minister is also free to visit whither 
he will. We have never had, however, an instance of a President 
going abroad during his term of office, but if the Chief Magistrate 
would like to go to Mexico, Cuba, or Canada, for a short trip, few 
would object, provided he left the public business in good hands. 

Quarrels between Cabinet officers are not rare in either America 
or England, and it sometimes takes all the shrewdness of a President 
to prevent his administration from falling to pieces. 

During the midst of the great civil war in the United States, the 
Secretary of State and the Secretary of the Treasury were reported 
to be at variance, and in the middle of summer Washington was 
thrown into a ferment by the resignation of Mr. Chase, as Secretary 
of the Treasury. The publication, some weeks before, of the " Pom- 
eroy Secret Circular," in the interest of Mr. Chase as a Presidential 
candidate, had created much talk and considerable bad feeling in the 
party. The President, Lincoln, however, took no part in the discus- 
sion or criticism which followed. " On the contrary," says Carpen- 
ter, the artist, " he manifested a sincere desire to preserve pleasant 
relations, and harmonize existing differences in the Cabinet. In 
proof of this, I remember," continues the same authority, " his 
sending one day for Judge Lewis, the Commissioner of Internal 
Revenue, and entering into a minute explanation of a misapprehen- 
sion which he conceived the Secretary of the Treasury to be laboring 
under, expressing the wish that the Commissioner would mediate on 
his behalf with Mr. Chase." 

Many sincere friends of Secretary Chase considered his resigna- 



172 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

tion at this juncture unfortunate and ill-timed. The financial situa^* 
tion was more threatening than at any period during the war. Mr. 
Chasers administration of the Treasury Department, amid unpar- 
alleled difficulties, had been such as to secure the confidence and 
satisfaction of the masses, and his withdrawal, at such a time, was 
regarded as a public calamit}^ giving rise to the suspicion that he 
apprehended national insolvency. The resignation, however, had 
been twice tendered before. The third time it was accepted. During 
this period, Mr. Carpenter, an artist at the White House, says, 
" I never saw the President under so much excitement as on the 
day following the event. Without consultation or advice, so far as 
I ever could learn, he sent to the Senate, the previous afternoon, the 
name of Ex-Governor Tod, of Ohio, for the successorship. The 
nomination was not popular, and great relief was experienced the 
next morning when it was announced that Governor Tod had de- 
clined the position. Mr. Lincoln passed an anxious night. He 
received the telegram from Governor Tod declining the nomination, 
in the evening. Retiring, he laid awake some hours, canvassing in 
his mind the merits of various public men. At length he settled 
upon Hon. William P. Fessenden, of Maine, and soon afterwards 
fell asleep. The next morning he went to his office and wrote the 
nomination. John Hay, the Assistant Private Secretary, had taken 
it from the President on his way to the Capitol, when he encountered 
Senator Fessenden upon the threshold of the room. As Chairman 
of the Finance Committee, he also passed an anxious night, and 
called thus early to consult with the President, and offer some sug- 
gestions. After a few moments' conversation, Mr. Lincoln turned to 
him, with a smile, and said, " I am obliged to you, Fessenden, but 
the fact is, I have just sent your own name to the Senate for Secre- 
tary of the Treasury. Hay had just received the nomination from 
my hand as you entered. " Mr. Fessenden was taken completely by 
surprise, and, very much agitated, protested his inability to accept 
the position. " The state of his health," he said, "if no other con- 
sideration, made it impossible." Mr. Lincoln would not accept the 
refusal as final. He very justly felt that with Mr. Fessenden's 
experience and known ability at the head of the Finance Committee, 
his acceptance would go far towards re-establishing a feeling of 
security. He said to him, " Fessenden, the Lord has not deserted 
me thus far, and he is not going to now. You must accept ! " 

They separated, the senator in great anxiety of mind* Through- 



THE PRIME MINISTER AND THE CABINET. 173 

out the day Mr. Lincoln urged almost all who called to go and see 
Mr. Fessenclen, and press upon him the duty of accepting. Anions 
these was a delegation of New York bankers, who, in the name of 
the banking community, expressed their satisfaction at the nomina- 
tion. This was especially gratifying to the President, and in the 
strongest manner he entreated them to see Mr. Fessenden, and assure 
him of their support." 

In England Cabinets often fall apart, because the Prime Minister is 
deserted by some one strong colleague whose ability or influence 
is necessary to conciliate the House of Commons. The defeat of a 
ministry in Parliament is held to be quite as disgraceful as the 
repudiation of an administration at the polls in this country. The 
defeat and retirement of Earl Grey, the chief supporter of the 
beneficent Reform Bill of 1832, is as affecting as the retirement 
of some American Presidents. 

The old statesman, now in his seventy-first year, had to t^ike leave 
of power. He was worn and weakened by the toils and responsibili- 
ties of office, and he was conscious of having fallen somewhat behind 
the time, earnest as he was in saying that the times went too fast, 
and not he too slow. The close of his term of power was mortifying, 
if not ignoble, in its character, affording but too much excitement to 
the taunts and vindictiveness of adversaries, — taunts and triumphs 
which were not spared even on this occasion. Twice he rose and 
murmured a few words, stopped and sank down upon his seat. The 
House cheered him, and he seemed unable to rise. The Duke of 
Wellington occupied a few minutes in presenting petitions, in order 
to give Lord Grey time to recover himself. When the old man rose 
a third time, he spoke feebly and tremulously, but he gathered 
strength as he proceeded, and spoke so as to interest all feelings, of 
friend or foe, except where overpowering prejudices hardened some 
hearts and minds against all reverent emotions and clear convictions. 
The Duke of Wellington vehemently asserted that Lord Grey had 
deserted his sovereign, and his review of Lord Grey's Government 
was little short of malignant. "The old man retired/' says the histo- 
rian, " amidst universal if not unmingled sympathy and respect, to 
enjoy the repose which his years required, in the bosom of a family by 
whom he was adored. He had had the last experience of civic glory. " 
This sad departure from the glory of power is compared by Miss Mar- 
tineau, in her admirable book called the " History of the Peace," to 
the insult which the same Earl Grey poured out upon Mr. George 



174 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

Canning, when the latter was routed as Prime Minister three years 
before. At that time Canning sat in the House of Commons and 
Grey in the House of Lords, and the latter made a speech upon the 
demise of the former's administration, cold, hard, cutting, and cruel, 
so that the thought of it rankled in the victim to the last. They 
never spoke to each other nor met again. 

The extremest personal instance we have had in America of a dis- 
pute between Presidents was in 1869, when the incoming and the 
outgoing Presidents not only refused to speak to each other, but 
would not ride to the inauguration ceremony in the same carriage, 
nor, in fact, in the same procession. 

As an instance of violent rupture in an American Cabinet we may 
cite the famous contest in the administration of President Jackson, 
over the character of Mrs. Eaton, whose husband was a Cabinet officer. 
The latter had married a tavern-keeper's daughter, and the wives of 
his colleagues would not visit her. President Jackson sympathized 
with the lady, and strove in vain to raise Mrs. Eaton to the level of 
her political sisters. The result is humorously told by the biogra- 
pher, Parton : — 

"Could the Cabinet be other than an unharmonious one? It was 
divided into two parties upon the all-absorbing question of Mrs. 
Eaton's character. For Mrs. Eaton were Mr. Van Buren, Major 
Eaton, Mr. Barry, and the President. Against Mrs. Eaton were 
Mr. Ingham, Mr. Branch, Mr. Berrien, and the Vice-President. The 
situation of poor Eaton was most embarrassing and painful, for the 
opposition to his wife, being feminine, it could neither be resisted nor 
avenged. He was the most miserable of men, and the more the fiery 
President strove to right the wrongs under which he groaned, the 
worse his position became. The show of civility kept up between 
himself and the three married men in the Cabinet was at last only 
maintained on occasions that were strictly official. Months passed, 
during which he did not exchange a word with Mr. Branch, except 
in the presence of the President. 

11 After enduring this unhappy state of things for nearly a year, the 
President's patience was completely exhausted, and he was deter- 
mined that his Cabinet should either be harmonized or dissolved. For 
the next fifteen months there was the semblance of harmony among 
the members of this ill-assorted Cabinet. The President, however, 
did not often consult the three gentlemen who had families. The 
time-honored Cabinet Councils were seldom held, and were at length 



THE PRIME MINISTER AND THE CABINET. 175 

discontinued. Mr. Van Buren maintained and strengthened his 
position, as the President's chief counsellor and friend. The Presi- 
dent spoke of the Secretary of State by the name of 'Van,' and 
called him ' Matty ' to his face. It was decreed that Jackson's 
Cabinet should be dissolved upon this question. A dissolution of the 
Cabinet, except at the end of a presidential term, had never before 
occurred in the United States, and has occurred but once since. So 
unexpected was this event (the general public having received no 
intimation of the Eatonian scandals, and not immediately discerning 
the connection between the Cabinet explosion and Mr. Calhoun's 
pamphlet), that a slight rumor of some approaching change was ridi- 
culed in the Jackson papers, within three days of the announcement 
of Mr. V an Buren's resignation. It produced a prodigious sensation. 
At that day all official distinctions were more valued than they now 
are, and a Cabinet Minister was regarded as an exceedingly great 
man. It seemed as if the republic itself was shaken, when the great 
city of Washington was agitated, as all the hive is wild when the 
queen bee is missing. It added to the effect of the dissolution, that 
the leading editors would not, and the editors-in-ordinary could not, 
give any sufficient explanation of the event. Some vague allusions 
to ' Madame Pompadour ' found their way into print, but the Jack- 
son papers hurled fierce anathemas at those who gave them cur- 
rency." 

The English Privy Council bears the same relation to the Cabinet 
that the hand does to the mind, the former body having the power to 
do w r hat the latter body conceives to do. It often happens that an 
influential Privy Councillor is a member of the Cabinet, though he 
has no department to control, as if, for example, Mr. A. T. Stewart, 
of New York, being a friend and preferred confidant of President 
Grant, were to go into the Cabinet while he had no office to adminis- 
ter. To be struck off the sovereign's list of Privy Councillors is an 
extreme example of the ro} T al displeasure, and no instance of the 
kind has happened since 1805. The Privy Council exists six months 
beyond the death of one sovereign into the reign of the successor. 
The present large dimensions of the Privy Council would be a reason 
for dispensing with it in administration, if there were no other, for it 
is not adapted for despatch or secrec}\ In the Privy Council of 
Victoria, are Judges, Bishops, the Speaker of the Commons, the Am- 
bassadors, the Commander-in-Chief of the Arnry, the Pa} r master of 
the forces, and many other persons. Members of the Royal Family 



176 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

are not sworn in as members of this body, but are merely introduced, 
except the brothers of the sovereign, who must take the oath. The 
Queen, in Privy Council, can issue proclamations binding on the 
subject, and in extraordinary emergencies, or, when Parliament is not 
sitting, may even issue orders in contravention of law. Still, in any 
such extreme cases, the Privy Council must seek indemnification of 
Parliament. The Queen, in Council, appoints the Sheriffs for Eng- 
land and Wales, regulates quarantine, and lays or removes embar- 
goes ; but the Cabinet is generally at the bottom of these acts. The 
Privy Council has considerable control over insignificant colonies, 
and is supposed to be absolute over the Channel islands, which lie 
between England and France, and are of Norman population. What- 
ever the sovereign can do in person, as marrying off her daughters, is 
done in Privy Council. The Privy Council meets once a month, or 
oftener, at the Queen's Palace, six members constituting a quorum, 
and it generally consists of the Cabinet, the Archbishop of Canter- 
bury (who is the highest churchman in England), and the great 
officers of the Queen's household. Every member of the Privy Coun- 
cil ranks higher than a Judge or a Baronet, and one degree lower 
than a Knight of the Garter. When the Queen is not present this 
ceremonious old body is called the Lords in Council. Acts of Privy 
Council effecting important matters are considered in these days ex- 
traordinary and almost arbitrary, and if promulgated without the 
consent of the ministers would probably lead to the resignation of the 
Cabinet, and to a panic throughout England. It sometimes happens 
in America that the President and Cabinet resolve upon some momen- 
tous act, which is more properly, perhaps, the province of the legisla- 
tive body. 

The most important act ever agreed upon by a President and 
Cabinet was the Act of Emancipation, the subject of many eulogies 
and paintings, and of this Mr. Lincoln has left us an account in his 
own homely words : — 

"It had got to be midsummer, 1862," he says. "Things had 
gone on from bad to worse until I felt that we had reached the 
end of our rope on the plan of operations we had been pursu- 
ing ! That we had about played our last card, and must change 
our tactics or lose the game ! I now determined upon the adop- 
tion of the Emancipation policy, and without consultation with, 
or the knowledge of, the Cabinet, I prepared the original draft of 
the proclamation, and, after much anxious thought, called a Cabinet 



THE PRIME MINISTER AND THE CABINET. 177 

meeting upon the subject. This Cabinet meeting took place, I think, 
upon a Saturday. All were present, except Mr. Blair, the Post- 
master-General, who was absent at the opening of the discussion, but 
came in subsequent^. I said to the Cabinet that I had resolved 
upon this step, and had not called them together to ask their advice, 
but to lay the subject-matter of a proclamation before them, sugges- 
tions as to which would be in order after they had heard it read. 

" Various suggestions were offered. Secretary Chase wished the 
language stronger in reference to the arming of the blacks. Mr. 
Blair, after he came in, deprecated the policy, on the ground that it 
would cost the administration the fall elections. Nothing:, how- 
ever, was offered that I had not already fully anticipated and settled 
in my own mind, until Secretary Seward spoke. He said, in sub- 
stance : ' Mr. President, I approve of the proclamation, but I ques- 
tion the expediency of its issue at this juncture. The depression of 
the public mind, consequent upon our repeated reverses, is so great that 
I fear the effect of so important a step. It may be viewed as the 
last measure of an exhausted government ; a cry for help ; the gov- 
ernment stretching forth its hands to Ethiopia, instead of Ethiopia 
stretching forth her hands to the government.' His idea was that it 
would be considered our last shriek on the retreat (this was his pre- 
cise expression). 'Now,' continued Mr. Seward, 'while I approve 
the measure, I suggest, sir, that you postpone its issue until you can 
give it to the country supported by military success, instead of issu- 
ing it, as would be the case now, upon the greatest disasters of the 
war.' 

" The wisdom of the view of the Secretary of State struck me with 
very great force. It was an aspect of the case that, in all my thought 
upon the subject, I had entirely overlooked. The result was, that I 
put the draft of the proclamation aside. From time to time I added 
or changed a line, touching it up here and there, anxiously watching 
the progress of events. Well, the next news we had was of Pope's 
disaster at Bull Kun. Things looked darker than ever. Finally, 
came the week of the battle of Antietam. I determined to wait no 
longer. The news came, I think, on Wednesday, that the advantage 
was on our side. I was then staying at the Soldier's Home, three 
miles out of Washington. Here I finished writing the second draft 
of the preliminary proclamation ; came up on Saturday, called the 
Cabinet together to hear it, and it was published the following 
Monday. 



178 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

" At the final meeting of September 20th another incident occurred 
in connection with Secretary Seward. I had written the important 
part of the proclamation in these words : £ That on the first day of 
January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and 
sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State, or designated 
part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against 
the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever, free ; 
and the executive government of the United States, including the mil- 
itary and naval authority thereof, will recognize the freedom of such 
persons, and will do no act, or acts, to repress such persons, or any 
of them, in airy efforts they may make for their actual freedom.' 
When I finished reading this paragraph, Mr. Seward stopped me, and 
said, i I think, Mr. President, that I should insert after the word 
" recognize" in that sentence, the words " and maintain" ' I replied 
that I had already fully considered the import of that expression in this 
connection, but I had not introduced it, because it was not my way to 
promise what I was not entirety sure I could perform, and I was not 
prepared to say that I thought we were exactly able to ' maintain ' this. 

" But Seward insisted that we ought to take this ground, and the 
words finally went in. 

" As nearly as I remember, I sat, at the time, near the head of the 
Cabinet table ; the Secretaiy of the Treasur}^ and the Secretary of 
War were at my right hand, the others were grouped at the left. 

" Secretary Stanton, whom I usually found quite taciturn, referred 
to the meeting of the Buchanan Cabinet, called upon the receipt of 
the news that Col. Anderson had evacuated Moultrie and gone into 
Fort Sumter. 

" ' This little incident,' said Stanton, ' was the crisis of our history, 
— the pivot upon which everything turned. Had he remained in Fort 
Moultrie, a very different combination of circumstances would have 
arisen. The attack on Sumter, commenced by the South, united the 
North, and made the success of the Confederacy impossible. I shall 
never forget our coming together by special summons that night. 
Buchanan sat in his arm-chair in the corner of the room, white as a 
sheet, with the stump of a cigar in his mouth. The dispatches were 
laid before us, and so much violence ensued that he had to turn us all 
out of doors.' " 

The Act of Emancipation will always be regarded as of Mr. Lin- 
coln's own contrivance, assisted therein by prominent members of 
Congress and of his Cabinet. It was proclaimed rather as an act of 



THE PKIME MINISTER AND THE CABINET. 179 

war than of justice, and is one of those few great tableaux of our 
history which are displayed, not upon the floor of legislation, but in 
the secrec} r of executive council. The correspondingly great act of an 
English Prime Minister was the Reform Bill of 1832. This was the 
work of Earl Grey and his Cabinet, acting in the name of King 
William IV., Victoria's predecessor. At the same time, Lord 
Brougham was Chancellor, Lord Durham was the Lord Privy Seal, 
and Lord Althorpe was Chancellor of the Exchequer. This bill was 
the English act of emancipation to several millions of English people, 
who had no part in their government. It rescued Parliament from 
the control of the landed aristocracy, and made it more the represen- 
tative of the nation. It also improved the morals of the government, 
and corrected much of its extravagance and corruption. For twenty 
years the abuses in public institutions, chartered companies, the 
church establishment, in charitable foundations, the management of 
the public revenue, and crown revenues, had been a constant subject 
of exposure in England. It was discovered and shown that the gov- 
ernment had not fulfilled its legitimate purposes ; that it had been 
carried on more for the benefit of the Cabinet administrators than the 
community ; that public services were extravagantly, unequally, or 
inadequately paid ; that public money was squandered in the main- 
tenance of sinecures and undeserved pensions ; and that peer and 
commoner, their relatives and dependents, participated in the general 
corruption. Even the ministry of the Duke of Wellington had not 
been free from opprobrium. Official patronage was abused, and Cabi- 
net ministers were found creating offices and putting their sons into 
them, and then abolishing the offices and receiving in lieu compensa- 
tion pensions. The progress of this Reform Act was much slower 
and more complicated than the American act of Emancipation. The 
first step was to get the conservative ministry out, which was accom- 
plished by defeating the Duke of Wellington, Prime Minister, in the 
House of Commons, on a motion, made from the liberal side, to exam- 
ine the accounts of his civil list. The King then requested of Lord 
Grey to "form a government." Lord Grey replied that he would 
undertake this task, provided a reform bill should be made a question 
for Cabinet consideration. The King, who was afterward called u The 
Reform King," immediately consented to this proposition, and delight 
was exhibited over the whole nation. Only the aristocracy and the 
parasite supporters of their political party felt sullen at their threat- 
ened loss of power. Lord Grey, the Prime Minister, took charge of 



180 THE NEW WORLD COMPAEED WITH THE OLD. 

the bill in the House of Lords, and Lord John Russell, though not a 
Cabinet minister, presented the bill in the House of Commons. In 
these days of democratic triumph in England, that Reform Bill does 
not seem to have been a sweeping measure ; but in 1831 it was con- 
sidered by the aristocracy no less than revolutionary. Indeed, as 
Russell read the list of boroughs to be disfranchised, the members 
from those boroughs thought he was jesting, and interrupted him with 
laughter. 

For seven nights the bill was bitterly debated, and nearly eighty 
speeches were delivered upon it ; the whole country was aroused ; 
political unions were formed over all the kingdom ; vast masses of 
disfranchised men, like our Wide- Awake and Union Leagues, pre- 
pared to march upon London by tens of thousands to present their 
mammoth petitions to Parliament. 

In the fullest House of Commons ever known to have divided on a 
vote, the ministers, with three hundred and two members voting for 
their bill, had still a majority of only one vote. At the next stage of 
the bill the ministers were defeated by a majority of eight votes ; then 
the Tory, or Conservative, party refused to vote supplies to the min- 
isters ; the ministers, therefore, determined to resign, and waited on 
the King to give up their seals of office ; the King refused to accept 
their resignations, seeing how fearfully the country was excited, and the 
ministers then advised him to dissolve Parliament. To this the King 
was loth to consent, for Parliament had scarcely yet begun the busi- 
ness of the session, and the average duration of an English Parlia- 
ment is more than three and a half years. While the ministers were 
reasoning with the King to thus precipitately break up Parliament, 
both bodies were in session, having been up nearly all night in a state 
of the highest excitement. 

In the House of Lords the aristocrats were even saying that the 
King had not the right to dissolve Parliament. Hearing this, the 
old monarch cried out that he would show them what he could do, 
and said that, if he could not have a state coach promptly, in which 
to proceed to Parliament, he would take a hack. Cannon boomed, 
after the usual habit, as the King drove rapidly to the House of 
Lords, where was happening the riotous scene which I have described 
at length in the fourth chapter of this book. 

One peer, Lord Mansfield, had to be pulled down to his seat by 
those around him before he would stop his speech, even in the King's 
presence. 



THE PRIME MINISTER AND THE CABINET. 181 

That day, the 22d of April, 1831, was the political crisis of the 
history of England in the nineteenth century. 

A general election was ordered all over the country. It was at- 
tended with the extraordinary agitation which will be described in a 
succeeding chapter. 

The reformers were successful all over the country, and in two 
months a new House of Commons assembled, pledged to support the 
new Reform Bill. For two and a half months the hot debate raged in 
that chamber, and then Earl Grey's ministry and the bill were sus- 
tained by three hundred and forty-five votes against two hundred and 
thirty-six in the opposition. The country was covulsed with joy, and 
the whisper now was, " What will the House of Lords do?" A mem- 
ber of the Cabinet, attended by a hundred Commoners, carried the 
bill up to the surly Lords. Only one Bishop voted for the bill ; twenty- 
one Bishops voted against the bill. The churchmen, less liberal than 
the secular aristocrats, defeated the cause of reform, and the House 
of Lords rejected the Reform Bill by forty-one votes. The country 
was in gloom, and curses loud and deep were uttered against Lords 
temporal and Lords spiritual. Then the King prorogued Parliament, 
or adjourned it for a long recess, in order that the Lords might hear 
the growls of the people. Riots occurred all over the kingdom in the 
interval ; then, after reassembling, the House of Commons passed 
the bill the second time. Again a member of the Cabinet carried 
the Reform Bill up to the House of obdurate aristocrats. After a long 
delay the bill was again defeated in the House of Peers by thirty-five 
votes. 

Now the last desperate measure of the Cabinet was suggested, to 
create enough new peers to outvote the unyielding aristocrats. The 
King fought hard against this extreme measure, and, at last, he sent 
a circular letter, dated from his palace, to each of the peers. The 
Duke of Wellington, always an inveterate enemy of the people, ac- 
cepted the suggestion of this letter, by absenting himself from the 
upper house when the vote was taken, and one hundred peers followed 
his example. The Reform Bill was finally passed, after more than two 
years' struggle, by both houses, and the King appointed a commis- 
sion to signify his royal assent to it. 

Such was the manner, and attended by such excitement, in which a 
little, incomplete measure of justice was forced by a Prime Minister 
and his Cabinet upon a weak King, an illiberal aristocracy, and a ser- 
vile House of Commons ; but more was accomplished than the mere 



182 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

of thifl net. It showed how agitation, organization, and out- 
cry, even from the disfranchised classes, could make themselves felt 
in a partial and narrow government. It was the same agitation which 
accompanied the proclamation of the Emancipation Act in America. 

In the Cabinet there are often disagreements upon matters of vital 
consequence to the nation. Atone time Lord John Russell denounced 
Lord Palmerston, and compelled his retirement, for interfering in the 
politics of the Continent without consulting his superiors. Prime 
Ministers l\ave frequently prosecuted the editors of the country for 
speaking harshly of them and their official acts. In former days, and 
even within the past twenty years, Prime Ministers were in the habit 
of using money to corrupt Parliament, and it was in this way that, 
against the will of the English people, Lord North continued himself 
in power during the whole of the American Revolution, bribing Parlia- 
ment to endorse him, and wheedling the King. 

Parliamentary corruption, under George IL, bad become an undis- 
guised element in the government, and still more; dangerous to civil 
liberty was the retention in its service of a body of hireling public 
writers. For these practices Sir Robert Walpole appears to have 
been justly reprehensible. Both Mr. Ilallam and Lord John Russell 
admit the corruption of this minister, but the latter doubts whet) u t 
his government was more so than that of the half century which pre- 
ceded and that which followed it. The direct bribery of Parliament 
is supposed, by Mr. Ilallam, to have continued to the end of the 
American war. 

If we examine the list of American Presidents and contrast it with 
British Prime; Ministers, we shall probably find that the latter affords 
the most renowned names. Many of our American Presidents have 
been the accidental suggestions of party conventions. An English 
Prime Minister must be strong enough to "form a government ; " yet 
the American President who, next to Washington, most commands 
the respect of the world, was one of those very accidents, and lie was 
ushered from obscurity to history on the shoulders of a party wherein 
not one man in ten thousand had ever heard his name. An English 
Prime Minister may be everything but obscure. Mr. Canning, one 
of the greatest, was even poor. But amongst English Premiers have 
been found poets, historians, jurists, novelists, and men of manifold 
acquirements ; our Presidents of late years have not been remarkable 
either for the extent or the variety of their learning. 

The English government, as influenced by "party," should be con- 



THE PRIME MINISTER AND THE CABINET. 183 

ceivcd of as a pedestal of bronze, whereon, according as circum- 
stances urge, one or other party leader is uplifted; it is of little 
moment whether to-day Lord Derby, or to-morrow Lord John Rus- 
sell, or the next day Mr. Gladstone, takes his stand thereon, the 

pedestal will still remain solid and unshaken. This kind of govern- 
ment would not suit a democracy ; for who could have formed a 
ministry in 1861? We should have fallen into anarchy at that time 
had we been obliged to depend upon the influence of mere statesmen, 
none of whom were of the same mind. But the constitution so 
clearly prescribed the time and method of electing a President, that 
the country, or that part of it which sustained the Union, was in no 
doubt about whom to rally. In England, where there is such uncer- 
tainty, the King is still at the head of the nation. The King never 
dies, and if he lose his sanity, as has happened with some English 
Kings, a Regent is appointed to govern in his name. 

In the thirty-eighth Congress a bill was introduced by some ad- 
mirers of the English government and particularly supported by Mr. 
George H. Pendleton of Ohio, providing that the President's Cabinet 
officers might have seats in Congress, and leave to debate there. 
This proposition was debated with much earnestness, but in the end 
it proved to have no popularity. 

General Garfield, one of the warmest supporters of this bill, said 
in the debate : — ■ 

" The British ministry is nothing more nor less than c a committee 
of the House of Commons.' I believe that no nation has a ministry 
so susceptible to the breath of popular opinion, so readily influenced 
and so completely controlled by popular power, as is the ministry of 
Great Britain by the House of Commons. Let one vote be given 
against the plans of that ministry, and it is at once dissolved. It ex- 
ists by the will of the House of Commons. 

" It does not, therefore, become gentlemen to appeal to our ancient 
prejudices, so that we may not learn anything from that great and 
wise system of government adopted by our neighbors across the 
sea." 

To this it was answered that what the United States needed was 
not quicker susceptibility to feel the breath of popular opinion ; and 
Mr. S. S. Cox, also of Ohio, and a member of Mr. Pendleton's part} r , 
made a very humorous and vigorous speech against the movement, in 
which he said : — 

" If the Executive, by its Cabinet, were in contact with the Legis- 



184 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

lature, the people would lose, through the aggressions of power, and 
the persuasions of corruption, their share of the government, and 
the Legislature, representative of their interests, would become the 
pliant instrument of the Executive. The democratic element of our 
institutions would be expunged, and the power which in England 
reached Parliament and people to corrupt and enslave would here be 
used for the same purpose." 

Yery frequently American Cabinet ministers visit Congress, in 
which, by rule, they have the right of access ; but no particular at- 
tention is paid to them. During the trial of the Impeachment of 
Andrew Johnson, nearly all the Cabinet Ministers were present in 
the Senate, and some gave testimony. Ministers are responsible here 
no more than in England, where, according to the best authorities in 
law, ministerial responsibility, in the modern constitutional sense, 
cannot exist, from the fact that the law does not recognize a " minis- 
try," but only individual advisers of the crown, whether presiding 
over a department or not. Impeachment is not restricted to the 
ministry ; every high officer of state may be brought before the 
supreme court of law, as was the case with Warren Hastings, the 
Scotch Lords in 1715, and in 1746 with the four Scotch Lords Bal- 
merino, Cromartie, Kilmarnock, and Lovat. 

Thus, on the impeachment of Sir Adam Blair and some others 
for high treason, the House of Lords, after full deliberation, resolved 
to proceed on the impeachments. The opinion of Blackstone, that a 
Commoner cannot be impeached before the Lords, for any capital 
offence, is contrary to the latest resolution of the supreme tri- 
bunal. 

Frequently the statesman in England, whom the King called to 
"form a government" is not at the head of the political party to 
which he belongs. An attempt was made in America, on the election 
of Thomas Jefferson, to set aside the public will by a shrewd bargain 
between the Whigs and Aaron Burr, who was an unscrupulous adher- 
ent of Mr. Jefferson. Mr. Jefferson arranged with the governors of 
the neighboring States to march their militia upon Washington city 
if this plot should be consummated. 

But one of our Presidents has been assassinated, and we have never 
given his widow a pension. When Percival, who had been Prime 
Minister and Speaker of the House of Commons, was shot dead in 
the lobby by a lunatic, the grant of Parliament mounted up to this, 
— Fifty thousand pounds for the children ; two thousand pounds a year 



THE PRIME MINISTER AND THE CABINET. 185 

to their mother, — this two thousand pounds per annum to revert to 
the heir on the death of the widow, to be enjoyed by him for life ; 
and one thousand pounds a year for life to the eldest son, on his com- 
ing of age. When this grant was made, no one dreamed of the des- 
tination which awaited a part of this monstrous provision. In the 
shortest possible time that decency would permit, Mr. Percival's widow 
married again. The wife of Mr. Lincoln repeatedly petitioned Con- 
gress for a pension of five thousand dollars a year. Apprehensions, 
which revived the case of the widow of Percival, militated against 
this moderate request. 

Notwithstanding the almost powerless condition of the monarch in 
England, the present Queen, with all her virtues, has been three 
times subject to attempts upon her life. Before her marriage she was 
annoyed by lunatics who wanted to wed her, and who stopped her 
horse or stole into her palace. A boy, named Oxford, fired two pistol- 
shots at her as she was riding near Hyde Park with her husband in 
1840. Oxford was put in a lunatic asylum for twenty-seven years, 
and then expelled forever from British possessions. He seems never 
to have been a lunatic, and he ascribed his crime to inordinate vanity, 
probably the inspiring principle of Booth's assassination. After the 
Queen had been several times fired upon subsequently, Parliament 
passed an act punishing her persecutors with flogging as well as per- 
petual imprisonment amongst lunatics. President Lincoln was fired 
upon one night as he rode to the Soldier's Home ; but the perpetrator 
of the act was not discovered, and news of the incident was sup- 
pressed. A deliberate attempt was also made upon the life of 
President Jackson. There are few sovereigns in Europe who have 
not been attacked, and Prime Ministers have been repeatedly 
mobbed. The Duke of Wellington had to nail up his windows at 
Apsley House to resist volle}^ of stones, and Lord Castlereagh, a 
high Cabinet officer, was driven by public execration and his own per- 
versity to commit suicide ; the nation rejoiced over his death as if a 
battle had been gained over a foreign enemy. 

The British Cabinet holds its meetings at the Foreign Office, which 
corresponds to our State Department, or at the residence of the 
Chancellor of the Exchequer, who has an official residence close by 
the Houses of Parliament and the Queen's city palace, in a little lane 
called Downing Street, which is, in truth, the Capitol of England. 

No instance is on record in recent times of an English Cabinet 
minister revealing the secrets of Cabinet meetings. Lord Brougham 

24: 



186 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

once charged this upon Lord Durham ; but it proved to be a slander. 
It was Parliament in England which abolished slavery in the British 
colonies at the suggestion of the Cabinet, nearly thirty years in ad- 
vance of America. The slave-trade had been abolished in 1807, and 
by a later statute, following the example of the United States, de- 
clared to be piracy ; but the act of 1833 abolished slavery itself in 
the West Indies. The eight hundred thousand slaves were not at 
once declared free, which would have been precipitate, and tended to 
disorder, but their gradual emancipation was definitely prescribed. 
All children under six years of age, or born after August 1, 1834, 
were declared free ! All registered slaves above six years became 
apprenticed laborers, divided into two classes. The term of appren- 
ticeship of one class, namely, those employed in agriculture, expiring 
in 1838, and of the other class two } r ears later. These terms of ap- 
prenticeship were anticipated by the masters setting the negroes free 
before the expiration of them. The most difficult question to settle 
with the planters was the amount of compensation to be paid to 
them as the price of emancipation. At first a loan of fifteen millions 
Of pounds was thought of; but this was deemed an inadequate equiv- 
alent,' and subsequently the loan was transmuted into a gift of twenty 
millions of pounds. It w r as by the proceeds of slave labor in the 
West India Islands that the fine future of William E. Gladstone, the 
present distinguished English statesman, was acquired. His father 
gave him five hundred thousand dollars during his lifetime, and left 
him much by will. He went to Parliament at the age of twenty- 
three, was a member of the administration at twenty-five, and at 
twenty-nine denounced emancipation in a speech. He has lived to 
become almost a radical. 

We are in the habit of considering William Pitt the greatest of 
English ministers, but the doubtful results of his policy upon English 
happiness has gone far to impair his reputation. He was the states- 
man of a selfish period. " He had no popular sympathies," says one 
critic, " though he certainly would have had if the people had ever 
come before his eyes, or he had had that high faculty of imagination 
which might have brought them before the eye of his mind. To him 
the people were an abstraction, and he had no turn for abstrac- 
tions." 

A Prime Minister has, practically, no such absolute power over the 
Cabinet as a President, although he is generally obe}<ed b}^ his col- 
leagues. A rupture in an American Cabinet would be a public scandal, 



THE PRIME MINISTER AND THE CABINET. 187 

but in England a similar breach might overthrow the Prime Minister. 
The study of politics in any country shows that jealousy, envy, and 
intrigue are associated with the dispensation of power. John Bright 
remarked in 1868 : — "I have seen so much intrigue and ambition and 
selfishness and inconsistencies in the character of many statesmen, so 
called, that I have always been rather anxious to disclaim the title." 
Mr. Disraeli, once Prime Minister, avows for himself pretty much what 
Mr. Bright charges. He says : " The truth is, a statesman is the 
creature of his age, the child of circumstances, the creature of his 
times. A statesman is, essentially, a practical character, and when 
he is called upon to take office he is not to inquire what his opinions 
might or might not have been upon this or that subject. He is only 
to ascertain the needful and the beneficial, and the most feasible 
manner in which affairs are to be carried on. I laugh at the objections 
against a man, that, at a former period of his career, he advocated 
a policy different to his present one. All I seek to ascertain is, 
whether his present policy be just, necessary, expedient. Whether 
at the present moment he is prepared to serve his country according 
to its present necessities. " 

Frequently a British King and his Prime Minister are on ill-terms 
with each other. George III. upbraided Pitt bitterly, and Queen 
Victoria, as we have seen, disliked Sir Robert Peel for many 3-ears. 
Scarcely more confidence has marked some American Cabinets. 
Adams, Hamilton, and Jefferson, in Washington's administration, 
were almost enemies. Andrew Jackson was, perhaps, the most 
exacting master of a Cabinet that w r e have ever had. He ruled 
by prerogative almost entirely, and we have this sketch of his man- 
ner in office, in the diary of a witness : — 

" Cabinet Council, the fourth of May, 1838. Present, the Secretary 
of State, Livingston ; of the Treasury, McLane ; of War, Cass. The 
Maine boundary question was under consideration. Mr. Livingston 
had asked me for a rule to draw up some lines upon a map. After 
some minutes , search I entered the President's office with a rule in nry 
hand. The map was on the table before the President. Mr. Living- 
ston was at his side, looking over the map with him, and making 
some remarks on the measure under consideration. He had just 
uttered the idea that its adoption would, probably, raise a clamor, 
when the President interrupted him with the words, ' I care nothing 
about clamors, sir, mark me ! I do precisely what I think just and 



188 THE NEW WOULD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

right.' As lie uttered the last, his forefinger came down perpendicu- 
larly upon the map." 

The English people have looked at our form of government, simple 
as it seems to be, with a good deal of curiosity. One of the latest 
of them, the popular writer, Mr. Anthony Trollope, says of this 
subject : — 

" It will be alleged by Americans that the introduction into 
Congress of the President's ministers would alter all the existing 
relations of the President and of Congress, and would, at once, pro- 
duce that parliamentary form of government which England pos- 
sesses, and which the States have chosen to avoid. Such a change 
would elevate Congress and depress the President. 

" No doubt this is true. Such elevation, however, and such 
depression seemed to me to be the two things needed." 







ECCLESIASTICAL EDIFICES. 

1— Winchester Cathedral, England. 2— Rheims Cathedral, France. 3— Notre Dame, Paris. 

4— Trinity Church, New York. 5— Interior of St. Paul's, London. 

— St. Sophia Mosque. 7— St. Peter's, Rome. 



CHAPTEE Vn. 

CHURCH AND STATE. 

An account of the established church in England, and of its influence upon America. — 
Sketches of the church dignitaries, cathedrals, and parish institutions of the United 
Kingdom. 

By this time we have seen the complicated character of the British 
government : a Queen with immense revenues, yet ruled entirely by 
a partisan Prime Minister and a Privy Council. But the Queen at 
her coronation, as has been described, is invested with a spiritual as 
well as a temporal sceptre. She stands at the head of the Established 
or Government Church of England, — a feature of national life which 
is comparable with nothing in this country. 

Let us begin the examination of the subject of Church and State 
by some geographical notices. 

Forty miles from London, near the mouth of the River Thames, is 
the old town of Canterbury, which stands upon the flat lands of the 
county of Kent, a snug little old-fashioned town, out of which rises 
the enormous bulk of a great cathedral, so high, broad, and vener- 
able that it has been likened to a natural mountain upheaved there. 

About two hundred miles north of London, in the middle of the 
large county of York, stands the city of York, once potential, now 
merely venerable, and this old town is also ridden by the towers and 
walls of a mighty cathedral. 

These two cathedrals give the names to the two greatest digni- 
taries of the Established or Government Church of England. At the 
head of this Church is the Queen. She is its Pope, exercising nomi- 
nal sovereignty, both temporal and spiritual, as the Czar of Russia 
is the sovereign head of the Greek Church. Below the Queen are 
the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, the former being known as 
the " Primate of all England/' the latter as the " Primate of Eng- 
land." These two dignitaries keep their name and rank precisely as 
their predecessors bore them when the Roman Catholic Church was 
the Church of England, and a long and bitter quarrel on the score 

189 



190 THE NEW WOKLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

of precedence between the two primates was settled by a Pope of 
that day. The Archbishop of Canterbury is altogether the most 
powerful of these two churchmen, and far from being content to reside 
in the little town of Canterbury, he inhabits a palace in London, 
while the Bishop of London is altogether his subordinate. 

He is the first peer of the realm, and has precedence over all gov- 
ernment functionaries, and the entire clergy. In rank he comes im- 
mediately after the Princes of the Blood. He is privileged to have 
eight chaplains, whereas a Duke may only have six at most. His title 
is "His Grace and Most Reverend Father in God." He subscribes 
himself " By Divine Providence, Archbishop;" whereas other bishops 
only write " By Divine permission." When speaking of him and the 
Archbishop of York, the wonted form of expression employed is, 
44 He is enthroned ; " whereas the other bishops are merely said to be 
" installed." 

The title of a Bishop is " Right Reverend Father in God," and 
he ranks after a Secretary of State, if the latter be a Bishop ; other- 
wise after Marquises younger sons. 

The Bishop of London is the " Dean in Ordinary " of the Chapel- 
royal. He nominates a sub-dean. The royal domestic chaplain is 
the u Clerk of the Closet ; " and has the right to say grace at the 
Queen's table. With him officiate forty-eight other chaplains, who 
celebrate divine service .daily in the Chapel-royal. The Queen's 
palace is thus kept as resonant with prayers and chantings as 
the Vatican at Rome. At the Chapel-royal seats are appropriated 
to the nobility ; the service is chanted by boys three times a clay, and 
great jealousy is exercised with regard to the admission of strangers. 
The Bishop of London lives in a fine residence in the fashionable 
part of the town, close by the Queen's palaces ; he is paid fifty thou- 
sand dollars a year. 

The residence of the great Archbishop of Canterbury is a quaint 
old brick palace, within sight of the Houses of Parliament, and on the 
opposite side of the river, in the district called Lambeth. It is sur- 
rounded with large grounds, and its brick towers are conspicuous 
above the verdure which surrounds it. For six hundred years the 
Archbishops of Canterbury have lived on this spot. There are 
twenty-five thousand volumes in the library of this palace, and its 
tenant, besides the fine archiepiscopal home, had an income of seventy- 
five thousand dollars in gold a year. In a pleasant old parish church, 



CHUKCH AND STATE. 19J 

adjoining Lambeth Palace, several of the Archbishops of Canterbury 
are buried. 

No information regarding the number of persons belonging to the 
Episcopal Church and those adhering to other religious creeds in 
England, is given in the latest official census books. It appears, 
however, from the returns of the Registrar-General, that, in the } r ear 
1861, out of a total number of one hundred and sixty-three thousand 
seven hundred and six marriages, one hundred and thirty thousand 
six hundred and ninety-seven were solemnized according to the rites 
of the Established Church : these figures refer only to England proper. 
In 1860 there were fifty-four thousand and nine churches in the United 
States, with property valued at one hundred and seventy-one million 
dollars, and church accommodation for nineteen millions of people. 
This shows that we have a church to about every five hundred and 
eighty persons. The Protestant Episcopal Church in the United 
States may be considered as a legitimate branch of the Established 
Church of England, except in the political affiliations of the latter. 
There are nearly two thousand two hundred Protestant Episcopal 
Churches in the United States ; and the membership is supposed to 
be about eight hundred thousand ; their church property w T as valued, 
in 1860, at twenty-two millions of dollars. 

At the time of the Revolutionary War, there were not more than 
eighty clerg3 T men of the Church of England established north of 
Maryland and Virginia ; in the two latter States they had legal 
establishments of their own, but in the Northern States were sup- 
ported by missionary societies in the mother country. The largest 
grant of land ever made to an American church has now become the 
famous Trinity Church Corporation of New York city ; the original 
grant, however, was inconsiderable. The first independent Protestant 
Episcopal Bishops of the United States were consecrated in the 
old Palace of Lambeth, which we have described, and by the Arch- 
bishop of Canterbury, according to a special act of Parliament. Two 
of these Bishops were Philadelphians, and one represented Trinity 
Church, New York. 

The following is a part of the ceremony, at the installation of an 
English Bishop, as performed at the present day, by the Archbishop 
of Canterbury : — 

" After the Gospel and the Nicene Creed and the Sermon are ended the 
elected Bishop (vested with his rochet) shall be presented by two Bishops unto 
the Archbishop of that province (or to some other Bishop appointed by law- 



192 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

ful commission), the Archbishop sitting in his chair, near the holy table, and 
the Bishops that present him saying : — 

" ' Most Reverend Father in God, we present unto you this godly and well- 
learned man to be ordained and consecrated Bishop. ' 

" Then shall the Archbishop demand the Queen's mandate for the consecra- 
tion and cause it to be read. And the oath touching the acknowledgment of 
the Queen's supremacy shall be ministered to the persons elected, as it is 
set down before in the Form for the Ordering of Deacons. And then shall 
also be administered unto them the oath of due obedience to the Archbishop, 
as followeth : — 

" The Oath of Obedience to the Archbishop. — 'In the name of God, I, N., 
chosen Bishop of the Church and See of N., do profess and promise all due 
reverence and obedience to the Archbishop, and to the Metropolitical Church 
of N., and to their successors. So help me Gocl, through Jesus Christ.* 

"Then the Archbishop and Bishops present shall lay their hands upon the 
head of the elected Bishop, kneeling before them upon his knees, the Arch- 
bishop saying : — 

" ' Receive the Holy Ghost, for the office and work of a Bishop in the Church 
of God, now committed unto thee by the imposition of our hands in the name 
of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. And remem- 
ber that thou stir up the grace of God which is given thee by this imposition 
of our hands, for God hath not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and 
love, and soberness.' 

"Then shall the Bishop elect put on the rest of the Episcopal habit, and, 
kneeling down, Yeni Creator Spiritus shall be sung or said over him, the 
Archbishop beginning, and the Bishops, with others that are present, answer- 
ing, by verses, as followeth : — 

" f Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire, 
And lighten with celestial fire. 
Thou the anointing Spirit art, 
Who dost thy sevenfold gifts impart* 

U l Thy blessed Unction from abovo 
Is comfort, life, and fire of love. 
Illumine with perpetual light 
The dulness of our blinded sight. 

" ' Anoint and cheer our soiled face 
With the abundance of thy grace. 
Keep far our foes, give peace at homo 
Where thou art guide, no ill can come. 

M ' Teach us to know the Father, Son, 
And thee, of both, to be but One. 
That through the ages all along, 
This may be our endless song: 

" * Praise to thy eternal merit, 
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.'" 



CHURCH AND STATE. 193 

From the three American Bishops, apostolically consecrated as 
above by the English Primate, have sprung the more than forty 
Bishops who administer the affairs of the American Protestant Epis- 
copal Church at the present time. The Protestant Episcopal Church 
in America, relieved from its association with politics, has become 
one of the most flourishing and popular denominations in the repub- 
lic, — a fact which significantly shows the ability of any Christian 
church to support itself without the assistance of the temporal gov- 
ernment. 

There is an ostensible division of the territory of the United States 
into parishes, according to the polity of the American Episcopal 
Church. But this is very different from the English parish system, 
and also quite different from the civil parishes of Louisiana. 

An English parish may be considered as an ecclesiastical territory, 
like the Papal State, yet, by the changes of time, it has become a 
temporal as well as a spiritual community. By the common law, 
every land-owner or lease-holder residing in a parish is a parishioner. 
Every parishioner has the right to take part in the parish church gov- 
ernment, provided he fulfil the obligations which the parish imposes 
upon him. A meeting of parishioners constitutes a vestry, and the 
rector, or parson, presides over the same. The Church in England, 
being recognized by civil law, has power over all parishioners, whether 
they be Christians or Jews. The vestry, or the minister, or both, ap- 
point church-wardens, who keep the Church in good repair and take 
care of its furniture. Every parish has one Church, and some have 
two. The assembled vestry, or the church-wardens, levy the church- 
rates upon all lands and houses in the parish, and these rates are re- 
coverable at law. But no church-rates are paid upon royal property, 
ecclesiastical property, or by the "patron," — he who owns the parish 
Church and appoints the pastor. All persons must pay these church- 
rates, whether they belong to the Established Church or not ; Jews, 
Dissenters, and Catholics must thus pay for the support of a Church 
with which they have no s} 7 mpathy, perhaps, in any respect. This is 
one of the crying evils of the British government, and every year 
motion is annually made in Parliament to abolish these despotic 
church-rates. 

Quakers, by special statute, can make the parish pay back the 
church-rates which have been extorted from them. In several thou- 
sand English parishes Dissenters, Jews, and Catholics make a majority 
in the parish vestry, and summarily reject the church-rates ; in other 
25 



194 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD, 

words, they meet as part of the Church, and vote against paying any 
money to the Church. 

Out of the popular unwillingness in England to pay rates to the 
support of the Church have grown many notable lawsuits, chief of 
which was the great Braintree case, which passed from court to court 
like any civil case. This suit arose on this wise : — 

The parish Church of Braintree being very much out of repair, 
a monition issued from the Consistorial Court of London, command- 
ing the church-wardens to summon a vestry for a specified day and 
hour, and ordering the parishioners then to attend, and make a 
church-rate. A vestry having been convened, a rate was proposed 
and seconded. An amendment, in effect, u that no rate be granted," 
was moved and seconded, and, on a show of hands, carried. The 
majority of the parishioners who had negatived the granting a rate, 
having quitted the vestry, the church-wardens in the minority con- 
tinued to remain in the vestry, and reproposed and carried the 
necessary rate. The legality of the rate thus made was argued in 
the Consistorial Court of London before Dr. Lushington, who decided 
that the rate was invalid. From this decision an appeal was pros- 
ecuted in the Arches Court, and the Dean of Arches, reversing the 
decision of Dr. Lushington, held that the rate was a legal and valid 
church-rate. 

The decision of the Arches Court was brought under the consid- 
eration of the Court of Queen's Bench upon motion for a writ of 
prohibition restraining the judge of the Arches Court, the church- 
wardens of Braintree, and all other persons, from proceeding in the 
matter of the rate. 

The Queen's Bench decided that the rate was well made, and 
refused the writ of prohibition. A writ of error was brought on the 
judgment in prohibition, and the Court of Exchequer Chamber 
affirmed the decision of the Queen's Bench. Upon further appeal 
to the House of Lords that judgment was reversed, and it is now 
finally settled that the minority of the vestry have no power to bind 
the majority, and that a church-rate at common law can be legally 
imposed only by a majority of the parishioners duly convoked and 
assembled in vestry for that purpose. 

In many respects the Church of England has been liberalized by 
act of Parliament. In 1854, the arrogant regulations of the two 
established universities were rescinded, and in 1869, Mr. Gladstone, 
the Prime Minister, struck a vital blow at the Irish Church, a branch 



CHUKCH AND STATE. 195 

of the English Church establishment. So bitterly did the Bishops 
and some of the peers oppose this measure in the House of Lords, 
that a new creation of peers was threatened. And, curiously enough, 
the champion of the Irish establishment, in all its uncharitableness, 
was a statesman of Jewish extraction, whose race had been denied 
civil toleration in England down to the time of Cromwell, and had 
been kept out of Parliament even in Mr. Disraeli's lifetime. The 
career of the Jews in England, where they have risen to great power, 
and within a few years past have been admitted to many dignities, is 
not the least significant thread in the liberalization of England. 

A rich Jew of Amsterdam, Manasseh-ben-Israel, had previously 
petitioned in vain the "Long" and the "Barebones" Parliaments. 
Cromwell was more tolerant. He succeeded, notwithstanding the 
violent opposition he had to contend with, in establishing that, by 
his special commission, Jews might settle in England. Manasseh- 
ben-Israel received a pension from the Protector. 

Jews, who have lived seven years in any English colony, are 
naturalized, ipso jure. 

The pertinacious opposition against the admission of Jews to 
Parliament had partly a secret reason ; it was feared that if the for- 
mulae of religious oaths were removed opulent Mohammedans and 
Hindoos might succeed in buying their way to Parliament ; hence, 
only by special resolution of either house are the words " On the true 
faith of a Christian " omitted in favor of Jews ; the entrance to 
Parliament remaining still barred to Mohammedans and Hindoos. 

This latter question is to the Englishman what the question of 
Chinese and Japanese naturalization is to us. If England could be 
republicanized, as many Americans suppose, the heathens in her 
single colon}' of India would outvote the entire British race. 

Cromwell, whom I have referred to above, was a dissenter, and 
there is no ecclesiastical, nor even civil recognition of his administra- 
tion kept in England. 

Notwithstanding his stern and victorious Protectorate, both the 
man and the era of the Commonwealth are omitted from all legal 
documents, and many so-called historical documents of England. 
The reign of Charles II. is reckoned from the death of his father, 
the decapitated king. Thus, almost the only years, eleven, in which 
the English people have been classed as citizens and not as subjects, 
and represented at the head of the State by a hero of their own class, 
are swept away from their records by a fulsome and futile act of 



196 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

stultification. At the present day the criminal King, Charles I., is 
called u the martyr" in magazine articles and novels, while the body 
of Cromwell lies in a ditch amongst the remains of many other men 
as far in advance of English literary sentiment at the current time 
as their era is remote. And amongst a certain kind of celebrations 
patent still in England is that of " The Restoration," which may be 
described as the transition from glory to the shambles. There is not 
a statue of any English republican set up in London, except, per- 
haps, Milton. On the contrary, the meanest of the Stuarts and 
Hanoverians are well commemorated. It is certain that if " reform '' 
means anything in England, it will some day make sentiment, and at 
Charing Cross the effigies of the regicides may be expected to stand, 
within our own century perhaps, on the site of their brutal execu- 
tions. 

The history of the dissenting denominations in Great Britain is 
far more vivid and interesting than that of the Established Church. 

The English Reformation was unaccompanied by the stirring epi- 
sodes which marked the German reformation. The English clerg}^ in 
the main part quietly consented to be transferred from allegiance to 
the Pope to the control of the King, and the immense ecclesiastical 
estates with which William the Norman had invested his bishops 
were distributed amongst the nobles, to appease their scruples. The 
king himself took the lion's share. The great Abbey lands, which 
were almost at a stroke transferred from the Church to the State, 
have been mainly absorbed in the large manors of the aristocracy ; 
some of them have found their way to colleges, schools, and charities, 
and others belong to the crown lands down to the present time. But 
the remains of the beautiful Gothic edifices, which belonged to the 
Catholic age of England, are objects of beauty and interest over all 
the kingdom, covered with green ivy, which clambers up the long 
shafts and traceries of their portals, and blows in and out of the 
rich oriel windows suspended above. The American visitor beholds 
them almost with superstition ; for our ruins are confined to certain 
Indian mounds and the old stone windmill at Newport. 

The English Reformation, indeed, was not at first a rebellion in 
doctrine, but a civil contention with the Pope. One of the best con- 
tinental critics has said of it, that " the haughty sentiment of the 
Englishman, fancying for himself a national God of his own, a Deity 
providing for the affairs of other nations by the way merely, was 
loth to endure that a foreign prince beyond the realm should exer. 



CHURCH AND STATE. 197 

cise any jurisdiction upon his spiritual concerns." No sooner had the 
King asserted his own independence than he began to persecute the 
dissenters from his own church most unmercifully. The history of 
these persecutions is intimately woven with the settlement of the 
United States. 

By the Act of Uniformity, it was enacted that no person should 
thenceforth be capable of holding any ecclesiastical promotion or 
dignity ; or of consecrating or administering the sacrament, until he 
should be ordained priest according to Episcopal ordination ; and, 
with respect to all ministers who then enjoyed any ecclesiastical 
benefice, it directed that they should, within a certain period, openly 
read morning and evening service according to the Book of Common 
Prayer, and declare before the congregation their unfeigned assent 
and consent to the use of all things therein contained, upon pain of 
being ipso facto deprived of their spiritual promotion. This act is 
really the test-act of the English hierarchy. By its enforcement in 
1662, two thousand four hundred of its most efficient and devoted 
ministers were deprived of all promotion. 

In the year 1789, the Dissenters made an application to Parliament 
for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, and the old spirit 
was at once revived. A torrent of insult and abuse was let loose 
upon the petitioners ; a cry was raised that the Church was in danger, 
and a meeting was held in Manchester, "to consider of and consult 
about the impropriety of the application to Parliament of the Prot- 
estant Dissenters to obtain a repeal of those salutary laws, the Cor- 
poration and Test Acts, the great bulwarks and barriers for a century 
and upwards of our glorious Constitution in Church and State." The 
High Church party carried the day, and the Dissenters were defeated. 
Among the resolutions passed at this meeting was the following: 
" That the religion of the State be the religion of the magistrate, 
without which no society can be wisely confident of the integrity and 
good faith of the persons appointed to places of trust and power." 
This meeting was followed by the formation of a " Church and King 
Club," the members of which wore uniforms with a representation of 
the Collegiate Church engraved upon their buttons ; and the standing 
toast at their numerous convivial meetings was, " Church and King, 
and down with the Rump." As a counterpoise to the operations of 
this club, some of the more moderate Churchmen and Dissenters, 
zealous reformers, resolved to form an association of their own, and 



198 THE NEW WORLD COMrARED WITH THE OLD. 

hence was begun the " Manchester Constitutional Society," which 
soon comprised a considerable number of members. 

The exclusivencss of the established clergy is sufficiently demon- 
strated by the fact that they do not allow the bodies of Dissenters to 
. be interred in their church-yards. It would seem that there is no ob- 
jection to the burial in such church-yards of Dissenters who have been 
baptized in infancy ; the only service, however, allowed at the burial 
is that of the Church of England. A bill tending to modify this was 
thrown out. Statutes against blasphemy have been in force even in 
our century. In 1824, eleven clerks at Carlisle were sentenced to 
fines and imprisonment for having sold Tom Paine's works. The 
Lord Chancellor Eldon, in 1822, refused protection to the copyright 
claimed in Byron's "Cain/' because the book was of a blasphe- 
mous nature. The same Lord Chancellor, in the following year, 
rejected the prayer of Dr. Lawrence, the celebrated physician, for 
protection against the infringement of copyright of his lectures, be- 
cause he denied therein the immortality of the soul. Under the same 
system Shelley was even deprived of the guardianship of his own 
children, as being a blasphemer. 

In the British navy there is no recognition of any other worship 
than that of the Established Church, and no permission even to Ro- 
man Catholic sailors to absent themselves from its habitual celebra- 
tion on board ship. 

In the British army the practice is somewhat more diversified. 
Under the general orders of the service, Roman Catholic soldiers have 
for some time been everywhere exempted from attending the service 
of the Church. In Ireland their officers resort to their chapels in 
company with them, in order to prevent their being tampered with 
by political harangues ; but the precaution hardly meets the supposed 
necessity, as the sermons are often in Irish. There was, until re- 
cently, no similar exemption for Protestant Dissenters, probably be- 
cause no rule of their religious communities in general forbids their 
attendance at the worship of the Establishment, but in July, 1839, an 
order was issued forbidding the exaction of compulsory attendance 
from any soldier of a persuasion other than that of the Church. 

At each military home station divine service is performed by local 
clergymen of the Church Establishment, in England ; and in Scot- 
land, either by those of the Establishment, or of the Episcopal com- 
munion, as the regiment may be Scotch or English. Episcopalians 
and Roman Catholics were entitled, in Scotland, before the recent 



i 



CHURCH AND STATE. 199 

order, to repair to their respective churches. The troops stationed in 
the forts in Scotland are allowed the services of a Presbyterian cler- 
gyman at the public expense. Thus it would appear that the princi- 
ple of the army is, a full toleration of all Dissenters, a recognition of 
the Established Church of Scotland, in Scotland, and of the Church 
of England generally. 

While Ireland has been saddled with an expensive Church estab- 
lishment, and the English Dissenter must pay his church-rates an- 
nually, the Scotch people, more fortunate, are permitted to have a 
different doctrine and organization. While King Henry VIII. and 
his Archbishop, Cranmer, were establishing a gorgeous Episcopacy in 
England, John Knox, a Scotch clergyman, who had been travelling 
on the Continent, returned to Edinburgh, and founded the Calvinistic 
Church. As Scotland was not definitely annexed to England until a 
comparatively recent period, it was permitted to have a separate 
Church establishment. 

The Scotch Church is a perfect democracy, all the members being 
equal, none of them having power or pre-eminence of any kind over 
another. There is in each parish a parochial tribunal, called a Kirk 
session, consisting of the minister, who is always resident, and of a 
greater or smaller number of individuals, of whom, however, there 
must always be two selected as elders. The principal duty of the 
latter is to superintend the affairs of the poor, and to assist in visit- 
ing the sick The session interferes in certain cases of scandal, calls 
parties before it, and inflicts ecclesiastical penalties. But parties 
who consider themselves aggrieved may appeal from the decisions of 
Kirk session to the presbytery in which it is situated, the next highest 
tribunal in the Church The General Assembly, which consists partly 
of clerical and partly of lay members, chosen by the different presby- 
teries, boroughs, and universities, comprises three hundred and 
eighty-six members, and meets annually in May, and sits for ten 
days ; but it has been the custom to appoint a commission, to take up 
and determine an}' matters it may have left undecided. The As- 
sembly is honored during its sittings with the presence of the repre- 
sentative to the Queen, who bears the title of Lord High Commis- 
sioner. He cannot interfere in any way with its proceedings. All 
matters brought before the Assembly are decided, after debate, by a 
vote. The dissenters from the Church are very numerous, and are 
variously estimated as comprising from one-half to two-thirds of the 
entire population. The largest body is the Free Church, formed 



200 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

from a secession in 1843. Next is the United Presbyterian Church, 
recently formed from an amalgamation of several bodies of seceders, 
some dating as far back as 1741. The Established, the Free, and 
the United Presbyterian Churches may be said to divide the Scottish 
nation among them. In doctrine the} r are identical, and only differ 
as to the propriety of their relation to the State. 

There is an Episcopal Church in Scotland which includes a large 
portion ot^ the nobility and gentry, and is said to be growing. Its 
members were estimated, in 1863, at twenty -two thousand. 

The Scottish establishment has commonly been jealous, in the ex- 
treme, of admitting either the term or the idea of regal headship. 
In the u Second Book of Discipline " it is stated that " it is a title 
falsely usurped by Antichrist, to call himself the head of the Church." 
Some of the English sovereigns have been enthusiastic advocates of 
their Church establishment, chief of whom was James I., a Scotch- 
man. 

In a controversy between some of his northern sages, when the 
question was " whether the practice of smoking tobacco was a sin,* 
the respondent maintained that it was lawful to get drunk with 
brandy, but not to smoke ; because the Holy Scripture saith, " that 
which proceedeth out of the mouth defileth a man, while that which 
entereth into it doth not defile him/' King James was the oracle, — 
the type of his time, — its pedantry, ignorance, and superstition. 
This * k wise fool," as Sully termed him, dedicated one of his literary 
performances to Jesus Christ. When James left his Scotch throne 
to become King of England, the Presbyterians expected that he 
would protect their theology in that country ; the King's reply was, 
14 No Bishops, no King." 

To the English Church we owe the noble translation of the Bible, 
which all English-speaking denominations use ; and also the beauti- 
ful prayers of the Episcopal liturgy. The English Church is entitled 
to high respect for its venerable character. 

It is the eldest of free churches that revolted from the Catholicism 
of Rome, commencing in the denial of the papal supremacy by Henry 
VIII. ; but it was not till the next reign that the theology of Protes- 
tantism really began to be introduced. Under King Henry innova- 
tions had been limited to the sovereignty of the Church and its tem- 
poralities, but under Edward VI. a new doctrinal worship was sought 
to be raised on the basis of the ancient religion. This was the vital 
commencement of the existing liturgy and ecclesiastical establish- 



CHURCH AND STATE. 201 

ment, of which the chief founder was Archbishop Cranmer, assisted 
by the zealous reformers, Bishops Hooper, Ridley, and Coverdale. 

The Established Church had its period of persecution in the rei^n 
of Queen Mary, and against its independence was directed that grand 
armada which perished in the English seas, and marked the last 
tableaux of the greatness of Spain. Several of the English sover- 
eigns have not been believers in the theology of the church of which 
they were the head. James II. was a Catholic ; William III. was a 
Calvinist ; and Queen Victoria is said, with good reason probably, to 
be a believer in Spiritualism. 

From the American Episcopal prayer-book have been expunged 
those prayers and ceremonials which refer to the connection between 
the Church and the State. From an English Liturgy in the Congres- 
sional library, I quote some prayers in use to this day in the English 
Church. 

PRAYER OX THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE DEATH OF CHARLES I. 

" Infatuate and defeat all the secret counsels of deceitful and wicked men 
against us : abate their pride, assuage their malice, and confound their de- 
vices. Strengthen the hands of our gracious Sovereign Queen Victoria, and 
all that are put in authority under her, with judgment and justice to cut off 
all such workers of iniquity as turn Religion into Rebellion, and Faith into 
Faction ; that they may never again prevail against us, nor triumph in the 
ruin of the Monarchy and thy Church among us. Protect and defend our 
Sovereign Lady the Queen, with the whole Royal Family, from all treasons 
and conspiracies. Be unto her an helmet of salvation, and a strong tower 
of defence against the face of all her enemies ; clothe them with shame and 
confusion, but upon Herself and her Posterity let the Crown forever flour- 
ish." 

PRAYER ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF DRIVING OUT THE SON OF THE 
ABOVE KING CHARLES I., NAMELY, JAMES II. 

" TVe bless thee for giving his late Majesty, King William, a safe arrival here, 
and for making all opposition fall before him, till he became our King and 
Governour. We beseech thee to protect and defend our Sovereign Queen Vic- 
toria, and all the Royal Family, from all treasons and conspiracies. Preserve 
her in thy faith, fear, and love ; prosper her Reign with long happiness here 
on earth, and crown her with everlasting glory hereafter." 

PRAYER ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE DISCOVERY OF THE GUNPOWDER 

PLOT. 

" God, whose name is excellent in all the earth, and thy glory above the 
heavens ; who on this day didst miraculously preserve our Church and State 
26 



202 THE NEW WOULD COMPAKED WITH THE OLD. 

from the secret contrivances and hellish malice of Popish conspirators; and 
on this day also didst begin to give us a mighty deliverance from the open 
tyranny and oppression of the same cruel and bloodthirsty enemies. We 
bless and adore thy glorious Majesty, as for the former, so for this late mar- 
vellous loving-kindness to our Church and Nation in the preservation of our 
Religion and Liberties. And we humbly pray, that the devout sense of this 
thy repeated mercy may renew and increase in us a spirit of love and thank- 
fulness to thee its only Author ; a spirit of peaceable submission and obedi- 
ence to our gracious Sovereign Lady Queen Victoria; and a spirit of fervent 
zeal for our holy Religion which thou hast so wonderfully rescued, and estab- 
lished a blessing to us and our posterity. And this we beg for Jesus Christ 
his sake. Amen." 

PRAYER FOR THE LORD LIEUTENANT OF IRELAND. 

N Almighty God, from whom all power is derived, we humbly beseech thee 
to bless thy Servant the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and grant that he may use 
the Sword which our Sovereign Lady the Queen hath committed into his hand, 
with justice and mercy, according to thy blessed Will, for the protection of 
this People, and the true Religion established amongst us. Enlighten him 
with thy Grace, preserve him by thy Providence, and encompass him with thy 
Favor. Bless, we beseech thee, the whole Council ; direct their consultations 
to the advancement of thy Glory, the good of thy Church, the honor of her 
sacred Majesty, and the safety and welfare of this kingdom: Grant this, O 
merciful Father, for Jesus Christ his sake, our only Saviour and Redeemer. 
Amen." 

It is a singular fact that the English statesman, who is chiefly- 
responsible for the breaking up of the Established Church in Ireland, 
has always been a rigid defender of the Established Church in Eng- 
land. Mr. Gladstone wrote a book upon the Church and the State, 
about thirty years ago, which is useful, as showing the views of an 
enlightened Englishman upon a subsidized religion. Of the divorce 
between Church and State, as practised in our country, he said : — 

" We must not imagine that the present condition of the United 
States can afford a conclusive test of the effects which are to be gen- 
erally anticipated from the absence of public religion. In the great 
society of nations, the customary rule will very much modify the 
temper even of those who depart from it. Perhaps the greatest por- 
tion of the real change will be suspended until such departure has 
become, or tend to become, the rule. If the day shall ever come when 
North America, still adhering to her present maxims and policy, shall 
lead the world ; when in religion, in art, in science, in morals, in 
manners, she shall give the tone to Europe instead of receiving it 
from Europe ; when the old civilization shall have fallen into decrep- 



CHURCH AND STATE. 203 

itude, and shall at a distance and feebly tread in the guiding foot- 
prints of the young one, — that day, and none earlier, will make full 
proof of the results of the divorce of religion from the State." 

That day has quite come. The combined churches of America 
outnumber those of England. The religious sentiment of this coun- 
try is as influential, and its missionary and charitable establishments 
as enterprising and complete, as the combined " establishments " of 
the United Kingdom. 

The same distinguished statesman thus affirms the natural reliance 
of religion upon government, which may interest the American 
reader unused to seeing statesmen express themselves upon such 
questions : — 

"It is clear that God has relations and reckonings with men in 
their national capacity. How are those relations to be conducted by 
a government which has not a religion ? The law is not the act nor 
the voice of an individual, nor of a number of individuals as such ; 
but it is a public instrument, proceeding from a public power, and 
that power the greatest upon earth ; and yet, under the proposed 
system, that power will be without religion. 

" The union is to the Church of secondary though great importance. 
Her foundations are on the holy hills. Her charter is legibly 
divine. She, if she should be excluded from the precinct of govern- 
ment, may still fulfil all her functions, and carry them out to perfec- 
tion. Her condition would be an}^thing rather than pitiable, should 
she once more occupy the position which she held before the reign of 
Constantine. But the State, in rejecting her, would actively violate 
its most solemn duty, and would, if the theory of the connection be 
sound, entail upon itself a curse." • 

The practical piety of the English Church people has never been 
questioned by any observer, but the subsidization of religion by the 
State has led to the gravest political and moral evils in England. 

The dignitaries of the Church are themselves members of a great 
political corporation, and, as such, bound up with the parliamentary 
government. The hereditary aristocracy looks on the Church as its 
domain ; it grants out, by the agency of the Cabinet, all the places in 
the gift of the Crown, and both in the Chapters and in the Bishops' 
sees has its members and partisans combined into one serried phalanx. 
The Church has consequently become a thoroughly mundane and polit- 
ical institution, and cannot any longer assert for itself an existence 
apart from the State. This is the testimony of a distinguished Eng- 



204: THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

lish critic. In the bosom of the English Church itself, there is the 
strife of party, its members being divided into the " high church," 
the " broad church," and the " low church." These parties have also 
been styled the " attitudinarians," the " latitudinarians," and the 
"platitudinarians." The distinctions between them are not, how- 
ever, readily appreciable ; of so subtle and dialectic cast are they, 
that only the initiated can rightly enter into them. 

Political ballads and speeches upon the subject of the Church are 
as familiar in England as they are with us, upon the Lobby, the 
Caucus, and the Nominating Convention. Here are some instances of 
songs sung by the Orthodox undergraduates of Oxford University : — 

" Old mother Church disdains 
The vile dissenting strains 

That round her ring; 
She keeps her dignity, 
And, scorning faction's cry, 
Sings with sincerity 
1 God save the king/ 

"Sedition is their creed; 
Feigned sheep, but wolves indeed, 

How can we trust ? 
Gunpowder Priestly would 
Deluge the throne with blood, 
And lay the great and good 
Low in the dust. 

"History, thy page unfold; 
Did not their sires of old 

Murder their King ? 
And they would overthrow 
King, lords, and bishops too, 
And, while they gave the blow, 

Loyally sing." 

The above song, it need scarcely be said, is sung to the music of 
" God save the King," which is the national anthem of England. 
The following partisan-ecclesiastic hymn is also curious, and not 
very respectful : — 

" Peers, knights, and squires in league combined, 
Protect your Good Old Mother; 
For should the beldame slip her wind, 
You'll ne'er see such another. 



CHURCH AND STATE. 205 

11 Two hundred years and more the Dam© 
Has tightly held together ; 
Her glorious motto, ' Still the same/ 
In spite of wind and weather. 

11 Her babes of grace, with tender care, 
- She feeds on dainty dishes ; 
And none but they have had a share 
Among the loaves and fishes ! " 

Not only is the Church degraded by this familiar mention, but the 
churchmen themselves, driven into partisanship, have become the 
most reactionary and intolerant class of English subjects. Of the 
great English reforms, such as the Reform bills of 1832 and 1867, few 
churchmen have been supporters ; they have always been the latest to 
hear the cry of the poor, as in the last days of the corn laws ; and 
of the degradation of ecclesiastics into politicians, we require no 
better examples than were afforded us during the struggle over the 
Irish Church in 1869 in all the English newspapers. 

At what we should call a Church Conference, a Bishop — not a 
dissenter — publicly wished that " Bill " Gladstone, as he elegantly 
called the Prime Minister, might go to what Mr. Mantilini, with re- 
gard for the feelings of his wife, called the demnition bow-wows ; 
but the Bishop of Cork named the place more directly. The same 
Bishop said in the same Church conference, " The bill had yet to 
go through the House of Commons, where it would be licked into 
shape. When it went into the House of Lords he trusted it would 
be licked in another sense. He hoped they would lick it like a bear, 
and leave nothing but the bare skin, and make Mr. Gladstone a pres* 
ent of it to stuff and put in his museum, and, as Milton said, ' grin 
on it.' " The assembled clergy applauded his grace, whereupon a 
Mr. Puxley added, " Let them hope that their dear Queen, God 
bless her ! would not perjure herself. Let her own good sense tell 
her whether it is right for her to perjure herself. It was a cowardly 
thing of Gladstone to take this opportunity, when a poor woman 
was on the throne, to confuse her, and endeavor to make her commit 
perjury. If Prince Albert were living he would not dare do it. The 
poor Queen relied on her ministers to advise her, and Gladstone, the 
traitor, the renegade, was one of them." 

Very many of the English clergymen pay no further attention to 
their churches than to draw the stipend thereof, but employ curates 
to read the prayers and the sermons. 



206 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD* 

The "Pall Mall Gazette" said, in 1869, that in England, from 
London to the LandVEnd, there is hardly a Bishop fit for work. The 
Bishop of Winchester, eighty years of age, is disabled by paralysis. 
The Bishop of Salisbury has broken down, both in body and mind. 
The Bishop of Bath and Wells is also disabled. As for the Bishop 
of Exeter, he is now in his ninetieth year, and for at least ten or 
twelve years has quite withdrawn from visitations and confirmations. 
Yet these prelates cannot be induced to resign. 

American readers are not unaware that the rectorships of English 
churches are considered both political and ecclesiastical offices. In 
every administration there is a Lord Chancellor, who has at his dis- 
posal about seven hundred " livings" belonging to the crown, and 
when the clergyman of a parish dies during his term of office, 
the Lord Chancellor fills the place with one of his partisans or 
friends. 

Besides the rights of presentation pertaining to the Queen, the 
Lord Chancellor, the Prince of Wales, the higher clerg}^, and the 
chapters, there are three thousand eight hundred and fifty peers, 
peeresses, baronets, parsons, gentlemen and gentlewomen, in the en- 
joyment of such patronage. How very intimately the Established 
Church is bound up with the governing class may, from this simple 
fact alone, be readily apprehended. 

Archbishops and Bishops are nominally elected by the Deans and 
Chapters, but are really appointed by the Prime Minister, in the 
Queen's name. It is a quaint subject for an American to think of a 
politician distributing bishoprics. A civil commission of lay politi- 
cians, called the " Ecclesiastical Commissioners," keeps the Church 
straight, and watch out for its estates, sales, etc. 

The British curates are a poor class of people, who are about as 
well paid as country preachers in America. 

"Convocation" is a kind of effete ecclesiastical Parliament. A 
few years ago this body met, and in its two bodies, the Upper House 
(composed of an Archbishop and his Bishops), and the Lower House 
(composed of Deans, Archdeacons, Proctors, and Clergy), a book 
called u Essays and Reviews," indicted by free-thinking clergymen, 
was condemned ; the proposition was entertained of reforming the 
Book of Common Prayer ; the marriage of a man with his deceased 
wife's sister was laboriously discussed, and some little harmless 
flunkeyism was addressed to the Queen. 

English rectors and ecclesiastical officers are good fox-hunters, and 



CHURCH AND STATE. 207 

they amuse themselves in ways which an American clergyman would 
hardly pass favorably upon. But they are eminently " conservative" 
in all matters of opinion, and this, in England, covers multitudes of 
sins. Some persons may be curious to ascertain the difference 
between the forms and doctrines of the Roman Catholic, and the 
English Established Church. The liturgy of the former is in Latin ; 
of the latter, in English. The English Church forbids the venera- 
tion of images of saints, and of the Virgin, and denies the doc- 
trine of transubstantiation, or that the body of Christ is not actually 
present in the Lord's Supper. But the confessional has not been 
abolished in the English Church. It has simply fallen out of use, 
and a relic of celibac} r remains in the fellowships of the colleges. 
In no nation in Europe is the State so closely identified with the 
Church as in England, and in none apparently is the time more dis- 
tant when State and Church will be divorced. The English Church 
Establishment extends to all its vast colonies, to India and to Cana- 
da. We have but to cross the line of the St. Lawrence to find how 
closely it is identified with the army, the Governor-General, and the 
office-holding classes. 

The architecture of English churches is of amazing splendor to an 
American. The largest and finest of our church edifi'ces are exceeded 
by the smallest English cathedrals, many of the latter having re- 
quired a century to construct them. 

How many have heard of Ripon Cathedral ? Yet its nave is a hun- 
dred and seventy-one feet long, and ninety-seven feet wide, and its 
towers are one hundred and sixty-one feet high. 

The Cathedral of Litchfield is three hundred and seventy-five feet 
long ; its roof is sixty feet high ; it has three spires, one of which is 
one hundred and eighty-three feet high. 

The towers of Worcester Cathedral rise to the height of a hundred 
and sixty-two feet. 

Gloucester Cathedral is four hundred and twenty feet long ; eighty- 
four feet high ; and its towers rise to the height of two hundred and 
twenty-five feet. 

Westminster Cathedral, as has been recited, is four hundred and 
sixteen feet long ; two hundred and three feet wide, and one hundred 
and one feet high ; and St. Paul's cathedral cost nearly four millions 
of dollars in the time of Queen Anne. 

The latter is the only great church which has been built in England 



208 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

in Protestant times, all the others having been Catholic property 
before the time of Henry VIII. 

An American in England can employ his time delightfully in pass- 
ing from town to town, looking at the quaint or grand churches and 
church-yards. There are no such fine public cemeteries in England 
as we possess ; for we commit our dead, in all the great towns, to 
beautiful parks. In all England there is scarcely one noble civil 
cemetery like ours at Boston, Rochester, Louisville, or Cincinnati. 

Canterbury, the ecclesiastical city, of which the great Archbishop 
is the representative, was once a rival in influence of London and 
Winchester. It was eclipsed, however, on the extinction of the 
Kingdom of Kent, by the royal cities of London and Winchester, 
and in spite of the great reputation of Archbishops Lanfranc and 
Anselm, Canterbury itself was comparatively little heard of until 
the murder of Becket in the cathedral (1170) lifted it at once to an 
equality with the most sacred shrines of Europe. St. Augustine, the 
former patron saint, gave place to the new martyr, and pilgrimages 
were made to his shrine from all parts of England, one of which was 
made the thread of the " Canterbury Tales," one of the earliest epic 
poems in the English language. At present, Canterbury contains no' 
more than eighteen thousand people. Pleasant glimpses of life in 
the old town maybe found in Dickens's novel of "David Copperfield. ,, 
On the site of its fine cathedral stood the earliest Christian church 
in England. The present cathedral is one of the finest and oldest in 
England. 

The Archbishop of Canterbury has charge of twenty other Bishops, 
while the Archbishop of York controls only seven. The former has 
for his Dean, the Bishop of London ; for his Chancellor, the Bishop 
of Winchester ; for his Vice-Chancellor, the Bishop of Lincoln ; for 
his Precentor, the Bishop of Salisbury, and for his Chaplain, the 
Bishop of Winchester. He crowns the sovereign of England, while 
the Archbishop of York crowns the sovereign's consort. 

York Cathedral, called the Minster, from the word Monasterum, is 
a magnificent old pile of magnesian limestone, finished about twenty 
years before the discovery of America. Its roof is a hundred feet 
above the floor, clear space ; its nave and aisles are one hundred and 
four feet broad ; the length of the cathedral is four hundred and 
eighty-six feet ; its transepts are two hundred and twenty-three feet 
long, and ninety-four feet broad ; its towers are two hundred and one 
feet high. There is a peal of twelve bells in its tower, one of which 



CHURCH AND STATE. 209 

weighs twenty-two thousand pounds. Not many years ago a religious 
lunatic burnt the massive timber roof of this old cathedral, and it 
cost, to replace the same, three hundred and twenty-five thousand 
dollars. It is a singular commentary upon English society that Sir 
Edward Vavasour gave the stone to restore this cathedral about 
twenty years ago from the same quarry from which Ins ancestors had 
built it in the fourteenth century. The jurisdiction of an Archbishop 
is called his "Province," of a Bishop, his "See;" the latter holds 
his own courts. The three greatest Bishops are those of London, 
Durham, and Winchester. Durham is worth forty thousand dollars 
a year, Winchester, thirty-five thousand dollars, and Ely, twenty-seven 
thousand five hundred. 

The salaries of some of the London churches are appended as 
matters of curiosity: St. Olave, 9,455 dollars; St. Botolph, Bishop's 
Gate, 8,250 dollars ; St. Marylebone, 6,250 dollars ; St. George's, 
Hanover Square, 3,500 dollars. 

One of the most delightful cathedrals in England is that of "Win- 
chester, which is within an hour's ride of Southampton, where many 
Americans disembark. It is the longest cathedral in England, 
namely, five hundred and sixty feet, of which three hundred and 
ninety feet can be seen at once, from the entrance ; the nave is 
seventy-eight feet high, and with its aisles eighty-six feet wide ; the 
breadth of the transepts is two hundred and eight feet, and its un- 
finished tower is one hundred and thirty-five feet high. 

Besides their salaries, the English Bishops have charge of a great 
man}' churches, and "present" to them, often it is supposed for a 
consideration. The colonial Bishop of Quebec get 9,950 dollars a 
year; of Toronto, 6,250 dollars; Montreal, 4,000 dollars; Nova 
Scotia, 2,750 dollars ; Newfoundland, 6,000 dollars ; Jamaica, 15,000 
dollars ; Barbae! oes, 12,500 dollars. American Episcopal Bishops 
seldom receive above 5,000 dollars. A Bishop has a council of his 
own called ct the Dean and Chapter," the latter composed of Canons. 
A Dean gets about 5,000 dollars a year, and a Canon 2,500 dollars. 
Westminster Cathedral has a Dean with 10,000 dollars a year. An 
Archdeacon and a Rural Dean are the Bishop's judicial officers and in- 
spectors. A church parson is called a Rector. To see something 
of the life of a British rector, read Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte 
Bronte. 

The following was the Irish Church Establishment a few years ago, 
27 



Ian 


r,£12,087. 


(4 


4,068 


(( 


8,000 


il 


4,204 


It 


6,253 


tl 


4,600 


ti 


7,786 


it 


4,200 


il 


5,000 


it 


2,498 


tt 


3,870 


it 


4,973 



210 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

and it was probably not materially changed down to the time fixed 
for the disestablishment of the same : — 

Archbishop of Armagh with Clogher, Primate, 
Bishop of Meath, with Clonmacuoise, .... 

" Derry and Raphoe, 

11 Down, Connor, and Dromore, . . • 
" Kilmore, Ardagh, and Elphin, 

" Tuam, Killala, and Anchonry, 

Archbishop of Dublin, with Glandelagh, and Kildare, 
" Ossory, Leighlin, and Ferns, 

" Cashel, Emly, Waterford, and Lismore, 

" Cork, Cloyne, and Ross, 

" Killaloe, Kilfenora, Clonfert, and Kilmacduagh, 

" Limerick, Ardfert, and Aghadoe, . 

The above makes about three hundred and thirty thousand dollars 
a year paid to twelve bishops, or nearly enough to discharge the 
salaries of all principal executive officers of the government of the 
United States, who reside in Washington. 

The total revenues of the Irish Established Church, in 1861, were 
nearly three millions of dollars, and there were alleged to be nearly 
seven hundred thousand communicants, or about fifteen members to 
every one hundred Roman Catholics. There were nearly as many 
Presbyterians in Ireland as Churchmen, and there were only three 
hundred and ninety-three pews in all Ireland. The latter fact shows 
that there must have been very little encouragement to do business 
in that island. 

The Irish Established Church has been a scandal and an oppression 
almost from its beginning, and hundreds of murders and crimes have 
been committed in the attempts to collect tithes from the unwilling 
people. Although the government has done everything in its power 
to discourage Catholicism and promote its own Church, the latter is 
always in straits, and it is now about to be given up. Such is the re- 
sult of mingling temporal and spiritual government. 

The Roman Catholic Irish Church is under four Archbishops, of Ar- 
magh, Cashel, Dublin^ and Tuam, and twenty-three Bishops. Among 
the whimsicalities of the English government is the support of a 
Catholic college, called Maynooth. , 

The support of the College of Maynooth was originally undertaken 
by the Protestant Parliament of Ireland, in the anticipation, which 
has since proved miserably fallacious, that a more loyal class of 



CHURCH AND STATE. 211 

priests would be produced by an education at home than by a foreign 
one, and that a gradual mitigation in the features of Irish Romanism 
would be produced, when its ministers were no longer familiarized 
' with its condition in continental countries, where it still remained the 
religion of the State, or was brought into contact with the revolution- 
ary principles then so prevalent in France. " Instead of which it has 
been found," says Gladstone, " that the facility of education at home 
has opened the priesthood to a lower and less cultivated class, and 
one more liable to the influence of secondary motives." 

In amount this grant is niggardly and unworthy. In principle it 
is wholly vicious ; and it can hardly fail to be a thorn in the side of 
the State of these countries, so long as it may continue. 

There are but eight Roman Catholic Bishops in the United States. 
I give their names and addresses below : — 

Most Reverend Jos. S. Alemany, San Francisco, Cal. 

" " Francis N. Blanchet, Portland, Oregon. 

" " Peter R. Kenrick, St. Louis, Mo. 

" " John McCloskey, New York city. 

" " J. M. Odin, New Orleans, La. 

" " Jno. B. Purcell, Cincinnati, Ohio, 

" " Martin John Spaulding, Baltimore, Md. 

" " James Duggan, Chicago 111. 

Within the past few years a strong Roman Catholic movement has 
taken place within the English Church, and led by Dr. Pusey and 
other " High Churchmen," a Ritualistic party has sprung up, with 
imitators in America. An infidel movement, led by Bishop Colenso, 
has also been one of the results of putting politicians into the pul- 
pits. A very interesting article in the " New York Tribune" in June, 
1869, gave the complete status of the Roman Catholic Church through- 
out the world. 

While the breach between the Roman Catholic Church and the 
Protestant Churches is at present either fully as wide as it was three 
hundred } T ears ago, or even wider, there are some notable exceptions. 
There are men and parties in several of the churches that have gen- 
erally been accounted among Protestants that regard a union with 
Rome as practicable and desirable. Others, while not going so far, 
consider the difference between the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox 
Protestant Churches as insignificant in comparison with those which 
separate the Orthodox Protestants from the Rationalistic tendencies 
of modern times, and they, consequently, advocate a coalition of all 



212 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

Christians who believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ and the inspira- 
tion of the Scriptures, against those who deny these docrines. Guizot, 
once Prime Minister of France, is one of the best-known representa- 
tives of this class of men, and he, at a recent meeting, expressed the 
opinion that Pius IX., in convoking the Council of 1869, exhibited 
an admirable wisdom, and that " from this assembly, perhaps, will 
issue the salvation of the world ; for our societies are very sick ; but 
for great evils there are great remedies. ,, Guizot is a Protestant. 
In Germany, a Protestant writer, Reinhold Baumstark, has issued a 
pamphlet on the Council, which breathes a similar spirit, and has had 
a very wide circulation. But nowhere, outside the Roman Catholic 
Church, was there so friendly a disposition towards the Council and 
towards the object of its convocation, as among a part of the Ritual- 
ists of the Church of England. There is an organized party, count- 
ing such men as Dr. Pusey among its members, which is even now 
ready to recognize an honorary Presidency of the Pope over the entire 
Christian Church, and which believes that the thirty-nine articles of the 
Church of England can be harmonized with the decrees of the Council 
of Trent. This party hopes and prays for the success of the Council, 
and some of its members advocate the sending of representatives to 
Rome to stipulate the conditions of their submission. All of which is 
interesting reading, to say the least. 

The most vigorous and prosperous denomination in America is the 
Episcopal Methodist, with its own Bishops. And it is a curious fact 
that, while John Wesley and the British Methodists have never had 
Bishops, the republican Methodist Church has a hierarchy. This 
Church was a secession, or rather a revolution, from the English 
Established Church. 

The great sepulchre of the Dissenters in England is Bunhill Fields 
burying-ground, where are buried Bunyan and all the great lights of 
the independent churches. 

Church and State has several times crept into American politics, 
as in the contentions over the Bible in the public schools, the Anti- 
Catholic party of 1844, etc. Our people have been wise enough 
heretofore to respect the clergy in all religious questions, and to 
entertain a wholesome jealousy of them in politics. The latest po- 
litico-theological movement is to insert the name of the Deity in the 
Constitution. 



CHAPTEE VIII. 

THE OFFICE-HOLDERS AND THE OFFICES IN AMERICA AND IN ENGLAND. 

An account of the executive departments and their occupants. — A sketch of the civil 
service in both countries, and an account of the judiciary. 

A stranger visiting Washington city requires no guide to show 
him the public offices. They stand revealed above the outlines of 
the straggling city, and are chiefly enormous temples in Greek and 
Roman architecture, perverted into the abodes of business clerks. 
Conspicuous amongst these buidings is the Treasury, an expensive 
edifice of granite, surrounded with huge monolithic columns, which 
stands immediately under the windows of the President's House ; the 
Patent Office and the Post Office, which occupy an eminence in the 
middle of the city ; the War and Navy Departments, and the head- 
quarters of the Commander-in-Chief, — plain brick edifices adjoining 
the President's House ; the State Department, in the environs of the 
city ; and the Agricultural Building, near the Potomac River. 

The principal government buildings in England, corresponding to 
our " Departments," lie in central London, and particularly in the 
neighborhood of the Houses of Parliament, upon a broad street 
called Whitehall. Some of the very largest offices, however, con- 
nected with the government, lie in remote parts of London, and oth- 
ers in the suburbs. The head-quarters of the Army and Navy, the 
Treasury, and the Palaces make one general group, as with us. The 
Treasury is a vast building, but is not as imposing as our own Treas- 
ur} r , and in it are housed the Board of Trade, the Home Secretary, 
and the Privy Council. In the council-room of the Lords of the 
Treasury, and at the head of their table, stands to this clay the empty 
throne of the Queen. Any account that I might give of many of these 
departments would be obsolete in a short time, for magnificent new 
edifices are now being constructed, and several of the old buildings 
will speedily be demolished. 

These new Public Offices of Great Britain, now nearly completed, 
will make one vast edifice in Italian architecture, to contain Foreign, 

213 



214 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

Colonial, East India, and many other bureaux and departments. 
The site of the building cost two hundred thousand dollars, and on 
the structure one million dollars have already been expended. About 
the old offices many curious recollections cluster, some of which are 
associated with important episodes in American history ; but it may 
safely be said that the earlier generations of American legislators 
provided for their public buildings in a more generous manner than 
any other people. 

In the old Colonial Office, which stands in Downing Street, just 
off Whitehall, Nelson, England's greatest sailor, and Wellington, her 
greatest soldier, met the only time in their lives. They were in an 
anteroom waiting to get an audience with the Secretary of the Colo- 
nies ; just as, during our civil war, many of our ablest generals be- 
came acquainted with each other while awaiting an audience at the 
War Department. 

The public business of the United States, since the civil war, has 
outgrown even the noble dimensions of our public buildings, and new 
structures are loudly demanded by the heads of Executive Depart- 
ments. Many persons think that the soberest of our Executive De- 
partments, architecturally, are quite as consistent and effective as our 
more ambitious structures ; that the Navy Department is in better 
taste than the Treasury, and the War Department, in its plain brick 
dress, is better than the great classical Patent Office. 

The English government, like our own, is much cramped for room 
to accommodate its officials, and the India Board is driven into a 
hotel, just as our State Department inhabits an Orphan Asylum. We 
pay, at Washington, about two hundred thousand dollars a year in 
rents, which would suffice to construct one fine new department an- 
nually. 

Many public buildings in America are constructed under contracts, 
and the cry is often raised that peculation occurs between the officials 
and the contractors ; but the history of public edifices in England is 
marked by the same excess of appropriation over estimates. It is 
only in severe despotisms, such as the French and Russian Empires, 
where the cost of public works is unchallenged. The number of civil 
officials employed in Great Britain considerably exceeds the census 
of the same class in the United States. 

The total number of officers in the United States Customs, during 
the administration of Washington (then called " the External Rev- 
enue "), was seven hundred and thirteen less than the present force 



OFFICES, ETC., IN AMERICA AND IN ENGLAND. 215 

of the New York Custom-house, and their annual compensation 
amounted to 439,567 dollars ; the number of officers in the Internal 
Revenue was four hundred and ninety-three, and their compensation 
was 113,000 dollars ; the number of officers connected with the Land 
Office eight, and their annual compensation 4,765 dollars ; the number 
of Postmasters nine hundred and ninet} T -four, with an annual compen- 
sation of 69,900 dollars ; while in all other departments of the civil 
establishment, including the officers at the seat of government, and 
in diplomatic service, there were four hundred and fourteen receiving 
annually a total of 445,000 dollars. These were the small beginnings 
of a service which now numbers more than fifty-three thousand per- 
sons, and whose annual compensation amounts to about 30,000,000 
dollars. 

The English census, of 1851, gave sixty-four thousand two hun- 
dred and twenty-four salaried civil functionaries, — a goodly crowd of 
officials, assuredly, considering the vast number of town and muni- 
cipal offices, purely honorary, and the total absence of government 
railway functionaries, etc., with which the continent swarms. The 
average salary of mere clerks, in England, being paid in gold, is 
higher than the remuneration of the same class in the United States. 
In the higher offices, the salaries in England are from three hundred 
to five hundred per cent, greater than in our own country. Let us 
take the case of the judiciary in both countries. 

The judicial system of England is much involved, the number and 
variety of courts being very great. There is an Attorney-General, 
as with us, but he is not a member of the Cabinet ; the English have 
also a Solicitor-General, and a Queen's Advocate. The Attorney and 
Solicitor-General have seats in Parliament, and are subject to the 
mutations of politics. All prosecutions in England are made in the 
name of the Queen. An English indictment is headed, " The Queen 

versus " In an American indictment, in a Federal 

Court, " The United States versus " Our judicial in- 
stitutions are derived almost directly from the English. We have a 
National series of Courts, and a series of State Courts ; Courts of 
Equity or Chancery, and Courts of Common Law. The Supreme 
Court of the United States is composed of a Chief Justice, with a 
salary of 6,500 dollars a year, and seven Associate Justices, with 6,000 
dollars a year ; there is also a local Supreme Court for the District of 
Columbia, with extensive jurisdiction, whose Chief Justice is paid 
4,500 dollars a year, and his three Associates, 4,000 dollars each ; 



216 THE NEW WOELD COMPATIED WITH THE OLD, ** 

there is a separate Orphan's Court, a separate Levy Court, and there 
are about sixty United States District Courts distributed over the coun- 
try, each having a Judge, with not more than 4,000 dollars a year, an 
Attorney and a Marshal, whose fees often far exceed the salary of the 
Judge. The United States is divided into eight circuits, to which 
the Supreme Court Judges pay annual visits. The United States has 
been exceedingly fortunate in the character and longevity of its Chief 
Justices, Marshall, Taney, and Chase having been men of irreproach- 
able lives, and wide experience in almost all the fields of human 
duty ; each of these Chief Justices had been an active politician, and 
reached his place in the line of political promotion. The United 
States Judges hold office during life, or good behavior ; they are 
appointed by the President. The Judges of the State and County 
Courts, in America, are almost all elected by the people, and fre- 
quently improper persons mount to those sacred offices on the shoul- 
ders of a partisan rabble ; the basest instance of this sort on record 
has occurred in our own generation, when a speculator, without other 
acquirements than ill-gotten money, has deliberate partnership with a 
Judge on the bench, and dictates his own decrees of spoliation. 

The United States cannot be sued by a citizen, but Congress has 
established a Court of Claims, consisting of five Judges, which inves- 
tigates claims for money due by the Federal Government. Its decis- 
ions, however, are not always final, as they can be reversed by Con- 
gress. 

It is treason to kill a superior judge, in England, wiiere treason is 
not strictly limited to levying war against the State, as with us ; no 
person has ever been convicted of treason in America, although there 
have been several trials on indictments for the offence. 

The highest Judge of Common Law, in England, the Lord Chief 
Justice of the Queen's Bench, is paid 40,000 dollars a } r ear ; the 
Chief Justice of the Common Pleas is paid 35,000 dollars a year ; 
the Chief Baron of the Exchequer is also a Judge, with the salary of 
35,000 dollars a year ; there are twelve Associate Judges, with 
25,000 dollars a } T ear, each ; these fifteen Judges constitute what may 
be called the Supreme Court of England, and, like our Supreme Jus- 
tices, they travel through the kingdom, which is divided into eight 
great circuits ; every Judge taking his Marshal with him, and before 
the day of railroads the entrance of a Judge into a County seat to 
hold assize was made the occasion of pompous celebration ; the 



OFFICES, ETC., IN AMERICA AND IN ENGLAND. 217 

Lord Lieutenant and the Sheriff, with an armed band, escorting the 
Judge into the town. 

The dignified manner of conducting law proceedings in England, 
tends to create a deep impression. The Judges do not sit in resplen- 
dent chambers ; the localities which serve as law courts at Westmin- 
ster have not an imposing aspect ; but the rich official costume of 
the Judges, and the wigs and gowns of the Barristers are calculated 
to establish a salutary restraint between the Judge, the parties inter- 
ested, and the public. This outward dignity is ordinarily combined 
with great calm and gentleness on the part of the Judge, and with an 
utter absence of all prejudice as against the accused, in the conduct 
of the proceedings. Of brow-beating on the part of the presiding 
Judge, and high-sounding invectives launched by the public prosecu- 
tor against the accused, there is in England no trace. 

This has not always been the case, however, especially in times of 
political excitement and persecution. In the indictment against Sir 
Walter Raleigh, Sir Edward Coke began his speech for the prosecu- 
tion with these words : " Thou art the lowest and most abominable 
traitor that has ever lived ; I am at a loss for words to mark out thy 
viper-like treason ; I will prove that never a more detestable viper 
lived in the world than thou. Thou art a monster ; thou hast an 
English face, but a Spanish heart ; thou viper, I thou thee, thou 
traitor." Coke behaved in the same way towards Essex. The name 
of Jeffreys, an English Judge, has become infamous through all the 
nations. 

In the United States, the Supreme Court thereof, at Washington, 
is at the head of the entire Federal Judiciary system, and takes cog- 
nizance of cases arising, both in law and in equity. The English 
have two great and distinct s}'stems of jurisprudence. 

At the head of the Equity Courts is the Lord Chancellor, or Presi- 
dent of the House of Lords ; he is a partisan officer, and loses his 
place when his party goes out of power. The other Equity Judges 
hold their places for life ; they are named as follows : the Master of 
the Rolls, the Lords Justices of the Court of Appeal in Chancery, 
two in number ; the Vice-Chancellors, three in number ; the Chan- 
cellor always receives a peerage. The Lord Chancellor is the best- 
salaried officer in England ; of the fifty thousand dollars a year 
which he receives, twenty thousand is paid him for presiding over 
the House of Lords. The Master of the Rolls gets 30,000 dollars 
a year ; the two Justices of Appeal get 30,000 dollars a year each ; 
28 



218 THE NEW WOULD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

and the three Vice-Chancellors 25,000 dollars a year each, or as 
much as the President of the United States. After fifteen years' ser- 
vice, or when disabled, the Judges both of Equity and Common Law 
receive handsome annuities. The Master of the Rolls retires upon 
18,750 dollars a year ; the Chief Justice of the Queen's Bench upon 
19,000 dollars a year; the Lord Chancellor upon 25,000 dollars a 
year ; the Judges of Appeal, upon 18,750 dollars a year ; and the 
Associate Judges of the higher courts upon 17,500 dollars a year. 
It is these enormous annuities which make the English government 
so costly ; but, we take the other extreme in America, and pay no 
pensions in any but the military services, and give our greatest 
officials such paltry salaries, that we may well wonder that corruption 
is not more general amongst them. Attached to these courts in 
England are numerous officers ; for example, there is an Accountant- 
General attached to the Equity Court, who takes charge of the vast 
property under its control ; this officer has had as much as two bil- 
lions and a quarter of dollars' worth of property lodged in his charge ; 
he is paid 15,000 dollars a year salary and keeps twenty-six clerks, 
several of whom receive 4,000 dollars a year. Another officer at- 
tached to the Equity Court is the Clerk of the Petty Bag, who makes 
out certain great writs, and is paid 3,000 dollars a year. There are 
also two officers called Masters in Lunacy, who look into the estates 
of lunatics. There are also eleven Commissioners in Lunacy, three 
of whom must be physicians, and three barristers, who are paid 7,500 
dollars a year each, and who investigate the conduct of lunatic asylums. 

In America almost every State has its own lunatic asylum, and 
many of the larger cities have corresponding municipal institutions. 
In some of the States there are salaried officers who have charge of 
their inspection. The government of the United States maintains 
one excellent insane asylum near Washington, where are placed the 
insane of the army and navy, and of the District of Columbia. 

There is also, substantially, a Court of Bankruptcy, in England, 
whose Commissioners receive ten thousand dollars a year, and have 
plenty to do. 

Imprisonment for debt is still the rule in England, although it has 
been abolished in almost all civilized countries. The principal Lon- 
don jail for debtors, in Whitecross Street, has been examined at great 
leisure by Mr. George Francis Train, and some other American gen- 
tlemen involuntarily residing in England. Almost every vestige of 
imprisonment for debt has disappeared from all the States of the 



OFFICES, ETC., IN AMERICA AND IN ENGLAND. 219 

Union. After the civil war in the United States, Congress passed a 
bankruptcy law, fair and equitable to both debtor and creditor. The 
English have also a court for the relief of insolvent debtors. 

We shall now consider some of the governmental departments and 
bureaux in both countries. Several bills have been introduced into 
the American Congress to establish a department of Home Affairs ; 
but none of these propositions have been entertained. 

The British Home Secretary is the great police officer of the king- 
dom, and has charge of the militia, prisoners, and almost all minor 
matters of internal government. He has police authority over the 
entire United Kingdom, except Ireland, which is ruled by a Lord 
Lieutenant. The following are the bureaux under the control of the 
Home Secretary : — 

1. The Police Courts establishment. A newspaper called the 
" Police Gazette," is published in London twice a week, and is dis- 
tributed gratuitously ; it contains lists of stolen property, suspected 
offenders and deserters from the army and navy. Bow Street has 
been, for a century, the great head-quarters of the English police 
system ; it is said to have the shrewdest police detectives in the 
world. The English police frequently come to America to apprehend 
felons, and the case of the murderer of Muller, who was seized on 
his arrival in New York in 1865, is still fresh in the memory cf the 
reader. London and vicinity, like New York and vicinity, constitutes 
a grand police department, which is controlled by two commissioners 
appointed by the Home Secretary ; each of the Commissioners receives 
six thousand dollars a year and house-rent. 

The London police establishment costs about two million dollars 
a year, and employs about six thousand men. The Home Secretary 
appoints four Inspectors of Prisons, who make the tour of all the 
jails in England and Wales every year ; they receive four thousand 
dollars a year and travelling expenses. There are also Directors of 
Prisons appointed by the Home Secretary. 

2. Inspectorships of Factories, Mines, etc. — Labor in mills is 
minutely regulated by law in England ; small children are forbidden 
to work, and the government exercises a humane fatherhood over the 
daughters of operatives ; so in mines, children under ten years of 
age cannot be apprenticed to work in them, and Inspectors make the 
rounds of all the mines in the kingdom, and report annually upon the 
condition of their laborers in the collieries. There are also Inspectors 
of Anatomy, who see that the medical students dissect no body 



220 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

which has not been obtained by fair means ; it was formerly a custom 
in England to kill people for the sake of selling their carcasses to the 
medical schools. 

3. Registration Office, — Births, marriages, and deaths are mi- 
nutely and promptly registered in England, as in almost every civilized 
government except America. The Registrar-General takes charge of 
the census in England. 

4. Tithe, Copyhold, and Enclosure Commissioners. — Tithe Com- 
missioners arrange for the commutation of church-rates ; the En- 
closure Commissioners see that land and commons are kept well 
fenced, and they attend to drainage ; they receive seventy-five thousand 
dollars a year, but the office will probably be abolished. 

The majority of the duties entrusted to the English Home Depart- 
ment reside in the separate States in America, and there ha§ always 
been a strong party in the republic to protest against the transfer of 
any of these functions to the Federal government. After the extinc- 
tion of slavery, a counter-movement was developed in favor of strip- 
ping the States of many of their old privileges, and centralizing them 
in the Federal government. This is, perhaps, one of the leading 
issues in the politics of the present day ; whether the States shall 
retain many of their former powers, or sink into mere counties, sub- 
ject to the powerful sovereignty of the Federal State. 

The Poor-Law Board, in England, exercises an important influence 
on the condition of the poor throughout the United Kingdom ; the 
head of the Board is styled its President, and his office is considered 
a partisan one ; he receives a salary of ten thousand dollars a year. 
Ireland has now a special commission of this sort. There is also a 
National Board of Health, — whose President receives ten thousand 
dollars a } T ear, — and a Special Commissioner of Sewers. 

A Metropolitan Building Commission sees that only safe houses 
are put up in London. This subject is entirely a matter of municipal 
control in America ; in the larger cities, the construction of wooden 
buildings is now generally forbidden. 

A great number of Commissions of Inquiry are appointed in Eng- 
land by the executive government; in America the duties which 
they perform are intrusted to Committees of Congress. 

The American Patent Office is both a great national edifice, and a 
great national instrumentality. It is almost the only bureau in the 
executive government, which is self-supporting. The building is four 
hundred and six feet long, and two hundred and seventy-five feet 



OFFICES, ETC., IN AMERICA AND IN ENGLAND. 221 

deep. Models of all patents issued in the United States are here 
exhibited, in four great galleries, which are unitedly more than thir- 
teen hundred feet long. About fifty thousand patents have been 
issued by this office, since 1836, while in England, not much more 
than half this number are recorded. In 1860, only about three thou- 
sand patents for inventions were issued in England. In the same 
year, four thousand eight hundred and nineteen w r ere issued in Amer- 
ica. The American Patent Office has an income of about two hundred 
and fifty thousand dollars a year. Around the building swarm a host 
of patent agents. It has a fine library for the use of inventors, and 
is one of the most unique and characteristic places of resort in the 
United States. 

The English Patent Office is under the control of the Courts, and 
is not, as with us, subject to the Home or Interior Secretary. There 
is a museum of patents in London, which would be insignificant, 
except that it contains some historical models, such as Arkwright's 
original spinning and carding machine, Trevithick's original locomo- 
tive, Watt's beam engine, and Millar's first steam engine for ships. 
The South Kensington Museum may be called the English Patent 
Office, and grand museum of English science and art besides. 

The Public Record Office, in England, is an immense establish- 
ment, — a vast fire-proof edifice in Chancery Lane, where are stored 
the most ancient, uninterrupted, and complete series of archives in 
the world ; a fine reading-room is connected with the Record Office. 
America is sadly in need of a building of tliis sort, and we have no 
adequate organization nor place, for preserving, indexing, and mak- 
ing available, our colonial and historical documents. The British 
burned some of the best American Records in 1814. Public atten- 
tion has been awakened to the necessity of collecting and preserving 
American documents, and all the great States in the Union now 
have historical societies, with libraries and officers. Mr. William 
H. Seward, our most distinguished Secretary of State, has taken the 
lead in encouraging a national taste for the collection and preserva- 
tion of American antiquities. 

The English government has expended more than two million dol- 
lars in Commissions of Inquiry- affecting the public records. 

In the chapter upon Finance, the reader will find a sketch of the 
Custom House and Internal Revenue offices ; in the chapter on Col- 
onies and Territories, offices in Ireland, and Consuls and Ambassa- 
dors will be described. Other subjects, affecting the relation of 



222 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

office-holders to offices, are distributed through the book, and can be 
readily found by the help of the index. 

Agriculture, in England, has not been so intimate a subject of gov- 
ernment investigation and control in the last twenty years as it for- 
merly was. The main interests of England, at present, are her mines, 
her manufactures, and her commerce. While she is using every energy 
to preserve these, the peculiar condition of her landed classes makes 
agriculture a matter of individual encouragement. But in the United 
States, our great staples for export come from the ground, not from 
the mills ; we have established agricultural colleges in all the larger 
States, subject to their control, and these are endowed munificently 
w r ith national lands. A special department has been created at 
Washington, to exercise vigilance over our agricultural interests ; to 
direct immigrants in the choice of lands ; to import seeds, and scat- 
ter them over the country gratuitously, and to encourage the intro- 
duction of new fruits, grains, and plants. 

The Commissioner of Agriculture receives about four thousand 
dollars a year, and has a large number of employes, entomologists, 
statisticians, chemists, etc. 

The Agricultural Building stands over the Tiber Canal, on a high, 
breezy knoll, a few minutes' walk from Pennsylvania Avenue, and 
close by the Smithsonian Institute. It is a brick building, trimmed 
w r ith brown stone, three stories high, exclusive of the attic, under a 
Mansard roof. It is a hundred and sixty odd feet wide, and sur- 
rounded by a farm of nearty forty acres. The building cost one hun- 
dred and forty thousand dollars, for its construction, furniture, and 
complete outfit, being almost the only public building that has not 
cost more than the sum voted for it. The terraces in front of this 
building are in excellent taste, and the farm is to be laid off in arbo- 
reta, to represent every tree capable of being adapted to our climate. 
Fish are also to be artificially spawned here. The building, within, 
is practically a museum of American cereals, fruits, birds, insects, 
etc. ; a laboratory for the analyzation of soils, and a library. It is 
very interesting, and seems to be shrewdly managed. 

The timber interests of the United States have not been guarded 
for government uses, as in England, w r here there are large forests, 
nominally belonging to the crown, w r hich are nurseries of ship tim- 
ber. The naval exigencies of the future are already agitating the 
minds of men of foresight, and the eastern part of the United States 
is almost as bare of good timber as are the British islands at present. 



OFFICES, ETC., IN AMERICA AND IX ENGLAND. 223 

The Chief Clerk in the English Admiralty Office gets 5,000 dollars 
a year ; his first class clerks receive from 3,000 dollars to 4,300 dol- 
lars a year ; his third class clerks receive 1,050 dollars. 

The Chief Clerk of the American Navy Department gets 2,200 
dollars a year; other clerks receive from 1,800 dollars to 1,200 
dollars a year. The chiefs of naval bureaux get 3,500 dollars a year. 

In the British Museum, which corresponds to our Congressional 
Library somewhat, the salaries of attendants are from 1,500 dollars 
to 400 dollars. In the House of Commons, the clerks receive from 
5,000 dollars to 1,250 dollars. In every large American city, the 
government has built an edifice for the Post Office and the Customs. 

In the English Custom's Department, clerks receive from 1,500 
dollars to 800 dollars. Gaugers receive from 2,500 dollars to 725 
dollars. American Custom's clerks are paid from 1,800 dollars to 
1,300 dollars a year. Gaugers are paid about the same sums. 

In the English Exchequer, a chief clerk receives 4,500 dollars ; a 
common clerk, from 700 dollars to 1,750 dollars. The chief clerks of 
the Treasury Department of the United States receive 2,200 dollars 
a year, and subordinate clerks from 2,000 dollars to 1,000 dollars a 
year. 

In the English Inland Revenue, which corresponds to our Internal 
Revenue, clerks receive from 4,000 dollars to 650 dollars. The Com- 
missioner of Internal Revenue, in America, gets 4,000 dollars a year, 
which sum is supposed to keep him pure, amidst all of the assaults 
of the " Whiskey Ring," and other immaculate organizations. 

In the English War Department, salaries range from 4,000 dollars 
for first clerks, to 450 dollars for messengers. In America , salaries run 
from 2,500 dollars to 725 dollars. Female clerks are employed in 
many American Departments. They are paid from 1,200 dollars to 
600 dollars a year. Copyists are paid ten cents per hundred words. 

Clerks in the English Treasury and War Office have seven weeks' 
holidays during the 3^ear ; in the Post Office a month ; in the Home 
Office about eight weeks ; in the Customs near five weeks. 

In the United States civil service, twenty-eight days is the average 
holiday ; we give Jack too much work, and little play, and have, 
therefore, a good many dull boys. 

American clerks take their stations at nine o'clock, and quit them 
either at three or four o'clock. No English clerk, in the civil service, 
begins work before ten o'clock, and the majority do not begin work 
until twelve o'clock ; they quit work either at five or seven o'clock. 



224 THE NEW WORLD COMPAKED WITH THE OLD. 

Little pains are taken, in America, to provide the public with in- 
formation upon the statistics, and other concerns of government. 
Every two years a great " Blue Book " is published, with the name 
and the salary of each official, and we take a decennial census at 
considerable expense ; the last of which filled nearly three thousand 
pages, and comprised five bulky volumes. The government publishes 
no " Moniteur," like France, nor "Gazette," like England, but 
advertises its wants in the daily newspapers at Washington and other 
cities. 

The English keep a State Paper Office ; this has been for three 
centuries a depository of the official correspondence of the country ; 
all the great state papers are classified and examined by clerks in 
this department. The State Paper Office has been combined with the 
Public Records Office in London.* 

The United States government has all the facilities for advertising 
its own sales, and proposals for purchase, either in the " Globe," 
which prints the debates of Congress, or from the government print- 
ing .office ; but these advertisements are generally used as party pat- 
ronage, and distributed amongst the stipendiary press. 

The "London Gazette" is the authorized medium for making 
known to the public state intelligence, orders in council, etc. A full 
series of the u Gazette," from its commencement, may be found in 
the Library of Congress, at Washington. 

In this "Gazette" are inserted all Royal Proclamations, Acts of 
Council, Diplomatic Dispatches, Laws signed by the Queen, Appoint- 
ments under the State, and Court Decrees. Copies of this important 
paper are transmitted to all friendly governments. 

Every year the " Gazette" office publishes a book of state intelli- 
gence, well indexed, costing one dollar and a quarter. The English 
monarch}' is popularly supposed to spend a great deal of money in 
corrupting the journals of its own and of rival countries. 

The Stationery Office of England is almost as old as the United 
States government. It purchases wholesale all stationery, and this 
single duty involves a national outla} r of nearly one million and a 
half of dollars. There are two leading officers of this department : 
Storekeeper, with the salary of two thousand dollars a } r ear, and twen- 
ty-four clerks, three examiners of paper, and about twenty ware- 
housemen ; Comptroller, four thousand five hundred dollars a year's 
salary, and a residence. 

The Treasury Department controls the Stationery Office. Sta- 



OFFICES, ETC., IX AMERICA AND IN ENGLAND. 225 

tionery in America is given out by separate officers in each of the 
Executive Departments, and much fraud and scandal attend the pur- 
chase and distribution of it. "We should have a Stationery Office. 
In England the government keeps its own mill to make bank-note 
paper. We are about to adopt the same system. 

The English Board of Trade and Plantations, which formerly was 
of great consequence, and which regulated many of our American 
Colonies, is now entrusted with a part of the inspection of railways, 
with the collection of statistics upon trade, and with many other mat- 
ters which apparently belong to different departments ; for instance, 
it has charge of the 

Com Returns' Office. — This bureau takes charge of the statistics 
of the price of corn, — corn, in England, being a word used to signify 
grain. 

Registry of Designs' Office. — Designs, or patterns as we would 
call them, being of great consequence in connection with English 
manufactures, this office registers original designs, charges a fee, and 
gives a copyright upon the design of from nine months to three 
j^ears. 

Joint Stock Companies 9 Registration Office. — The English have 
found, as we shall find, that stock companies must be watched, and, 
therefore, they compel the registration of every corporate company, 
its designs, and its members, and also compel the payment of a fee 
for registration. These registry papers are open to inspection on the 
pa}-inent of a fee. 

Department of Science and Arts. — This subject will be considered 
more particularly in the next chapter. 

Coal Wiippers' Office. — An immense amount of coal is discharged 
from vessels at the wharves of London. The laborers who unload 
the coals were required to be registered ; for this purpose the Board of 
Trade appointed three commissioners, the city of London one, and the 
Coal Factory's Society one. Only registered persons were employed, 
and a fee was charged to pay the expense of this coal whippers' com- 
mission. 

Merchant-Seamen's Registration. — English seamen must register, 
procure a ticket, and generally pay a fee. 

The Trinity House. — There are three institutions bearing this 
name in England, one at Hull, one at Newcastle, and one in London. 
The principal one is in London, and its revenues amount to one mil- 
lion and a half of dollars a year. 
29 



226 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

Trinity House has charge of. the commercial navy of the country, 
the keeping of light-houses, pilots, navigation laws, and the regula- 
tions about ballastage. This institution shows how thoroughly re- 
publican is the seamanship of England. The seamen have made 
England the great nation that she is, — the greatest nation in the 
modern world. In America we have of late paid little national atten- 
tion to our mariners. 

The London Trinity House is a corporation composed of thirty-one 
elder brethren and a limited number of younger brethren, selected by 
ballot from the masters of British vessels. This corporation is thor- 
oughly republican, and its constitution shows that the vital concerns 
of seamanship require the actual administration of the working sea- 
men. This corporation also gives relief to worn-out seamen, and its 
establishment in Hull relieves upward of a thousand persons a year. 
Trinity House is subject to the Board of Trade in most matters. 

We have permitted all the affairs of our merchant marine to run 
down. All the strong specific legislation is for the manufacturers. 

The English Treasury is the chief department of the English gov- 
ernment ; and, since the civil war in America, the Treasury is the 
chief department of the American government. In the chapter on 
Finance we shall consider this department in both governments. 

The English Post Office, which now forms one of the great public 
departments, was not established till the seventeenth century. In 
1649 a weekly delivery of letters to all parts of the kingdom was in- 
stituted, and in 1657 the office was placed upon nearly the present 
plan. In 1784 mail-coaches were first run, and the sluggish pace of 
the post was greatly accelerated. Gradual improvements and changes 
continued to be made till 1840, when the new system of a uniform 
rate of postage and the principle of prepayment was brought into 
operation. The history of the English Post Office is very interesting, 
and is fully related by Harriet Martineau. Here are some of the 
main items in it : — 

Coleridge, the poet, when a } r oung man, was walking through the 
Lake District, in the North of England, when he one day saw the 
postman deliver a letter to a woman at a cottage door. The woman 
turned it over and examined it, and then returned it, saying that she 
could not pay the postage, which was a shilling. Hearing that the 
letter was from her brother, Coleridge paid the postage, in spite of 
the manifest unwillingness of the woman. As soon as the postman 
was out of sight, she showed Coleridge how his money had been 



OFFICES, ETC., IN AMERICA AND IN ENGLAND. 227 

wasted, as far as she was concerned. The sheet was blank. There 
was an agreement between her brother and herself that, as long as 
all went well with him, he should send a blank sheet in this way once 
a quarter ; and she thus had tidings of him without expense of post- 
age. Most people would have remembered this incident as a curious 
story to tell ; but there was one mind which wakened up at once to a 
sense of the significance of the fact. 

It struck Mr. Rowland Hill that there must be something wrong in 
a system which drove a brother and sister to cheating, in order to 
gratify their desire to hear of one another's welfare. He immediately 
proposed a reform in the whole postal system. Mr. Hill proposed to 
reduce the cost of all letters not exceeding half an ounce in weight to 
a penny. The shock to the Post Office of such an audacious proposal 
was extreme. 

" He kept the idea in circulation, however, and at last it was adopted. 
No one has done so much as Mr. Rowland Hill in our time in draw- 
ing closer the domestic ties of the nation, and extending the influences 
of home over the wide-spreading, stirring, and most diverse interests 
of social life in our own country. And from our own country the 
blessing is reaching many more, and cheap postage is becoming estab- 
lished in one nation after another." 

Benjamin Franklin is generally alleged to have been the founder 
of the American Post Office, but since the adoption of railwa3 7 s we 
have made our main strides in republicanizing the Post Office, which, 
however, does not pay its expenses to this clay, but leaves a large 
deficit to be made by Congress. We have adopted many good ideas 
from the English, such as maintaining a money-order system, postal 
cars, and a free delivery by carriers. No Post Office is better admin- 
istered than ours, except with regard to extravagance The English 
have a pneumatic despatch for mails in great cities. 

Letters are inviolate in England, and cannot be opened except by 
the Secretaries of State and the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Be- 
tween 1843 and 1853 only six letters were opened. We are even 
more particular in America, although we have seized telegraphic 
despatches in two or three instances. There is a movement now in 
all the nations to make the telegraph adjunct to the Post Office. Mr. 
E. B. Washburne is at the head of this movement in America. 

The English Post Office is subordinate to the Treasury ; the leading 
officers of the Postal Department receive ten thousand dollars, six 
thousand dollars, and four thousand dollars a } T ear. The Postmaster- 



228 THE NEW WOKLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

General receives twelve thousand five hundred dollars a year. Nearly 
twenty thousand persons are connected with the English postal ser- 
vice, and their combined salaries exceed three millions of dollars. 

The mails leave London twice a day for all parts of the kingdom 
and for the continent, except for the small islands which lie near by 
the English coast. Through the postal-order system of England 
fifty millions of dollars are transmitted every year. The Franking 
privilege covers petitions to Parliament, and letters between the 
various departments. One feature of the English postal system is 
that of stamped newspapers, which go through the Post Office several 
times for the price of the original stamp. The poste restante of 
Europe is equivalent to our general delivery window. 

The postage collections in the United States on the correspondence 
exchanged with Great Britain and countries on the continent of 
Europe, amounted to $1,090,244.03 in 18G8, and the postages col- 
lected in Europe amounted to $616,223.73. The excess of collections 
in the United States was $474,020.30. 

The estimated amount of United States postage upon the letter 
mails exchanged with Great Britain and the continent of Europe was 
$793,700.64 ; in the same year with Canada and the British North 
American Provinces, $176,179.55 ; and with the West Indies, Brazil, 
Mexico, Japan, and China, and Central and South America, $128,- 
098.87 ; making in all $1,097,979.06. 

The number of letters exchanged with foreign countries (exclusive 
of the British North American Provinces) was 11,128,532 ; of which 
5,900,307 were from, and 5,228,225 received in the United States. 

The postal franking system is the great cause of the annual 
deficit in the American Post Office. The Postmaster-General in 1868 
said : — 

" I have had occasion frequently during the past year to call atten- 
tion of members of Congress to the use of their names in sending 
mailable matter free under a fac-simile frank. Three dollars will buy 
the fac-simile frank of any member of Congress, and the use of it by 
claim agents and business men in cities in sending books, periodicals, 
letters, and business circulars, defrauds the department out of im- 
mense sums of money. It is estimated that the loss of the depart- 
ment, by this species of abuse of the franking privilege, has amounted 
to from one million to one million and a half of dollars during the 
past year." 

The crowning shame of America is her debauched and partisan 



OFFICES, ETC., IN AMERICA AND IN ENGLAND. 229 

civil service, which has been almost entirely reformed in England, 
where it had to make a long struggle before it could be purified and 
organized upon a business and non-partisan basis. 

The mismanagement of the Crimean war gave rise to this now 
well-known agitation for administrative reform, which resulted in 
the partial opening up of the appointments in some, and the complete 
opening in others of the public departments. Mr. Layard was the 
first to raise this important matter. Mr. Gladstone, " heartily wished 
him God-speed," and said that he saw with unfeigned satisfaction 
that the state of public feeling was likely to take the direction given 
to it by Mr. Layard. He believed, in contradistinction to the popu- 
lar opinion, that the system of patronage was the weakness, not the 
strength, of the executive. What he wanted was a change in the 
basis of the whole system of the civil service ; perfectly free compe- 
titions for admission by the test of examination, and subsequent pro- 
motion by merit and efficiency alone. The public, he held, had a 
right to be served by the best men it could get for the price it 
offered. And he contended, not only that the existing system did 
not give the best men, but that it created a vast mass of collateral 
evils connected with the dispensation of patronage, which kept a 
large class of men in a state of expectancy wasting their lives in 
solicitation. How truly can we say this of our American civil service 
at present ! 

The term " civil service "is a phrase popularly used for general 
convenience, and represents the large body of men by whose labors 
the executive business of the country is carried on. It has been 
officially stated that the civil service of England includes more than 
fifty thousand officers, which would make a class more than twice as 
numerous as the clergy. Deducting, however, four thousand as 
office-keepers, messengers, etc., seventeen thousand as inferior revenue 
officers, postmen, etc., and fifteen thousand artificers and laborers 
employed in the various government dock-yards, we may calculate 
that there are, in round numbers, seventeen thousand civil servants of 
the higher class who are engaged in the various public offices of the 
United Kingdom. The civil service was in a condition quite as bad 
as ours at present when the reformers took hold of it. 

For many years the unsatisfactory condition of the permanent civil 
service had attracted considerable attention, as well out of Parlia- 
ment as in, until, in 1853, a commissioner was appointed with a view 
to the improvement and reorganization of that body. In the same 



230 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

year Sir Stafford Northcote and Sir Charles Trevelyan addressed a 
report to the Lords of the Treasmy, stating their opinion that " the 
right of competing for appointment in the civil service should be open 
to all persons of a given age, subject only to the necessity of giving 
satisfactory references to persons able to speak to their moral char- 
acter." The Queen's speech, at the opening of Parliament in 1854, 
contained the following passage : " The establishment required for 
the conduct of the civil service, and the arrangements bearing upon 
its condition, have recently been under review, and I shall direct a 
plan to be laid before you which will have for its object to improve 
the system of admission, and thereby to increase the efficiency of the 
service." No such plan was laid before Parliament, but on the 21st 
May, 1855, her Majesty issued an order in council, appointing com- 
missioners for conducting the examination of young men proposed to 
be appointed to any of the junior situations in the civil establish- 
ments, and authorizing them to give certificates of qualification be- 
fore such young men entered on their duties. After due consultation 
with the heads of the several departments of the civil service, a 
scheme of examinations was prepared, and the first examination took 
place on the 30th June, 1855, since which time examinations have 
been held nearly every week. The principle of examination has not 
only been twice affirmed by resolutions of the House of Commons, 
but has been formally sanctioned by two acts of Parliament. 

Government situations in England are ordinarily obtained in this 
way. A member of Parliament, whose political opinions coincide 
with those held by the party in power, is asked by an influential con- 
stituent to get a place in government office for a relation or a friend. 
The member of Parliament applies to the parliamentary Secretary of 
the Treasury, who has the distribution of patronage, or to the political 
head of some department. The Secretary of the Treasury, or the 
head of the department, willing to gratify a parliamentary constitu- 
ent, accedes to the request, and presents the member's protege with a 
nomination to one of the junior clerkships in his gift. The person 
nominated does not, however, as a matter of course, enter the public 
service, for no interest, however powerful, can confirm an appoint- 
ment unless the nominee is able to obtain a certificate of fitness from 
the Commissioners of the Civil Service appointed by the crown. 
Before granting their certificate the Commissioners ascertain : — 
First. That the nominee is within the limits of the age prescribed 
for the department to which he desires to be admitted. 



OFFICES, ETC., IN AMERICA AND IN ENGLAND. 231 

Secondly. That he is free from any physical defect or disease 
which would be likely to interfere with the proper discharge of his 
duties. 

Thirdly. That his character is such as to qualify him for public 
emplo} T ment. 

Fourthly. That he possesses the necessary knowledge and ability 
for the proper discharge of his official duties. 

Great pains are taken in England to see that a clerk has been hon- 
est in his previous career, and this form of letter is always addressed 
to his previous employers : — 

" Civil Service Commission, S. W. 

" Sir : — Mr. , a candidate for the junior situation of , having stated 

that he was employed by , I am directed by the Civil Service Commission- 
ers, to request that you oblige them by filling up and returning to me, in the 
enclosed envelope, the ' statement' hereto annexed. The postage need not 
be paid. I am to add that your answer will, if you desire it, be regarded as 
confidential, and that the word ' confidential ' should in that case be written 
on the envelope. The favor of an early answer is requested. 

" I am, sir, your obedient servant, 



" Questions. 

" 1st. Are you related to the candidate? If so, what is the relationship? 

" 2d. Are you well acquainted with the candidate ? 

" 3d. Will you have the goodness to mention the dates of his entering and 
quitting your employment, and his reasons for leaving? 

"4th. How long have you known him? 

" 5th. Is he strictly honest and sober, intelligent and diligent? 

" 6th. Do you believe him to be free from pecuniary embarrassment? 

" 7th. What do you know of his education and acquirements? 

" 8th. Has he ever been in the service of the government? and if so, in 
what situation ? 

" 9th. What has been the state of his health since you have known him? 

"10th. Are you aware of any circumstance tending to disqualify him for 
the situation which he now seeks ? " 



This reformed civil service has been one of the greatest blessings 
that was ever conferred upon England. 

In 1865, it appeared that the total number of nominations since the 
commencement of the civil service in May, 1855, amounted to twen- 
ty-nine thousand seven hundred and sixty-three. The number of 



232 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

competitors for the superior situations, in 18G4, was seven hundred 
and ninety for two hundred and fifty-one places, out of which five 
hundred and seventeen received nominations. Of the remaining two 
hundred and seventy-three, two hundred and foily-one fell below the 
standard of competence, nineteen failed in respect of age, five in re- 
spect of health, and eight in respect of character. For the inferior 
offices, — letter carriers, etc., — out of two thousand three hundred 
and eight} T -four, one thousand nine hundred and thirty-one certificates 
were granted. 

The practice of renominating unsuccessful candidates within a short 
time after their failure having led to abuses, the Lords of the Treasury 
have fixed three months as the shortest period after which they will 
grant a second nomination, and in the Admiral ty and War Office an 
interval of six months is required. A third chance is rarely offered 
to the unsuccessful candidate. 

We have no such examinations in the United States, but appoint- 
ments depend upon favor. 

The most important competitive examination that has taken place 
in England, since the establishment of the commission, was that for 
eight vacancies in the office of the Secretary of State for India. It 
was thrown open to all comers ; and, out of seven hundred and eighty- 
nine applicants, no less than three hundred and thirty-nine actually 
presented themselves for examination at Willis' rooms, London, on 
the 18th of January, 1859. The examination lasted three days, six 
hours each day, interrupted only by a break for refreshment, and on 
the 11th of February the names of the successful competitors were de- 
clared. Seven of the successful candidates offered themselves for a 
voluntary examination in extra subjects., and obtained honorary addi- 
tions to their certificates for proficiency in Greek, Latin, German, 
French, Political Economy, Euclid, Algebra, etc. The total of marks 
was one thousand five hundred and fifty, but the highest only reached 
one thousand one hundred and thirty, while the lowest was eighty-four. 
Of the successful competitors one was a sub-editor of a newspaper, 
one a school-assistant, two were school-masters, and three clerks. 

In contradistinction to the above examination take the testimony 
of Mr. S. M. Clarke, who filled a high government place in America. 
He says : — 

" I was referred for examination in August, 1856, to a Board of Ex- 
aminers appointed by the Secretary of the Treasury, consisting of 
Mr. Rodman, then Chief Clerk, and Major Barker and Mr. McKean, 



OFFICES, ETC., IN AMERICA AND IX ENGLAND. 233 

two prominent fourth-class clerks. The ' full particulars of such 
examination' were as follows: I was instructed by the then Secre- 
tary to appear before this board at a given time and place to be ex- 
amined. I put in my appearance at the time and place stated in my 
instructions. Major Barker commenced the ' examination ' by say- 
ing, { You are from New York, I believe, Mr. Clarke? ' I replied that 
I was. He then commenced a detailed narrative of his first visit to 
New York, and gave me an interesting and graphic account of the 
disturbance created in his mind by the ; noise and confusion ' of the 
great city. The delivery of this narrative occupied, as nearly as 
I remember, about half an hour. I listened to it attentively, en- 
deavoring to discover some point in his discourse which had reference 
to my * examination. ' I failed to discover any relevancy, and there- 
fore made no reply. At the close of his narrative, without any fur- 
ther question, he said to his associate examiners, ' Well, gentlemen, 
I presume there is no doubt but that Mr. Clarke is qualified.' Where- 
upon they all signed the certificate, and my ' examination' closed." 

All American statesmen have borne testimony against the custom 
of appointing partisan clerks. 

Mr. Nathan Sargent, Commissioner of Customs, tells this little 
incident of his own career : — 

" General Taylor, through Mr. Clayton, Secretary of State, first 
tendered me the office of Secretary of the Mexican Commissioners ; 
which I declined on the ground that I did not understand the Span- 
ish language. General Taylor was pleased to say that I was the first 
man he ever knew who declined an office because he did not consider 
himself fit for it ; and then offered me the office of Recorder of the 
Land Office, which I should have declined if I could without giving 
offence." 

To General and President Andrew Jackson and his vindictive na- 
ture we owe the demoralized condition of the civil service. He was 
the first President to turn everybody out of office who would not be- 
come his personal follower and dacquer. His best friends protested 
against it in vain, amongst them Major Lewis Jackson, his relative, 
who said : — 

11 1 embrace this occasion to enter my solemn protest against it, — 
not on account of my office, but because I hold it to be fraught with 
the greatest mischief to the country. If ever it should be carried 
out in extenso, the days of the republic will, in my opinion, have 
been numbered ; for, whenever the impression shall become general 
30 



234: THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

that the government is only valuable on account of its offices, the 
great and paramount interest of the country will be lost sight of, and 
the government itself ultimately destroyed. This, at least, is the 
honest conviction of my mind with regard to these novel doctrines of 
rotation in office." 

After Jackson began his partisan and personal proscription, the 
city of Washington was seized with panic, and all enterprise there 
declined. The system of proscription is still in vogue, and Wash- 
ington energy continues to be depressed. 

" Thirty-three houses," said a newspaper, just after Jackson's pro- 
scription began, " which were to have been built this year, we learn, 
have been stopped in consequence of the unsettled and uncertain 
state of things now existing here ; and the merchant cannot sell his 
goods or collect his debts from the same cause. We have never 
known the city to be in a state like this before, though we have known 
it for many years. The individual distress, too, produced in many 
cases by the removal of the destitute officers, is harrowing and pain- 
ful. Many of the oldest and most respectable citizens of Washington, 
those who have adhered to its fortunes through all their vicissitudes, 
who have ' grown with its growth and strengthened with its strength/ 
have been cast off to make room for strangers, who feel no interest in 
the prosperity of our infant metropolis, and who care not whether it 
advances or retrogrades." 

In spirited words the virtuous Josiah Quincy condemned this quad- 
rennial revolution in the public departments. Speaking of a dead 
office-holder, he said : — 

" The poor man shall hardly be dead, he shall not be cold long, 
before the corpse is in the coffin, the mail shall be crowded to reple- 
tion with letters, and certificates, and recommendations, and repre- 
sentations, and every species of standing sycophantic solicitations, 
by which obtrusive mendicity seeks charity, or invites compassion. 
Why, sir, we hear the clamors of the craving animals at the treasury 
trough, here in this Capitol. Such running, such jostling, such wrig- 
gling, such clambering over one another's backs, such squealing be- 
cause the tub is so narrow, and the company is so crowded." 

Henry Clay bore similar testimony to the system of rotation in 
office : — 

" It is a detestable system, drawn from the worst periods of the 
Roman republic, and if it were to be perpetuated — if the offices, 
honors and dignities of the people were to be put up to a scramble, 



OFFICES, ETC., IN AMERICA AND IN ENGLAND. 235 

and to be decided by the results of every presidential election, — our 
government and institutions becoming intolerable, would finally end 
in a despotism as inexorable as that of Constantinople." 

A movement is now on foot, at the head of which is Mr. Jenckes, 
of Rhode Island, to reform the civil service, in America ; but this has 
been attacked, by Mr. Woodward, Democrat, of Pennsylvania, and 
by General Logan, Republican, of Illinois, on the ground that a per- 
manent civil service is a European and monarchical institution. 

Appealing to a prejudice, these gentlemen are doubtless fearful 
that, by reforming the civil service, their hold upon the small offices, 
as a means of partisanship, may be imperilled. 

Another crying evil, in America, is the miserable salaries paid by 
government. My impulse has once been, that the clerks of the gov- 
ernment are paid enough. By an actual inquiry into the subject, I 
am satisfied that the salaries of the majority of clerks in Washington 
are insufficient, and the argument that plenty of people are waiting 
to take less seems to me to be conceived without regard to the 
respectability and honor of the public service. I know from experi- 
ence that three thousand dollars is a little sum to keep even a very 
little house, and a very little family, in Washington, while the Amer- 
ican boarding-house is a " hash house" of character, particularly in 
Washington. The system of " shaving " salaries in vogue in Wash- 
ington is an evidence of the incompetence of hire. Four-fifths of all 
the salaries are hypothecated before the month is half over, and the 
clerk pays ten per cent, a month for the advance. The result is beg- 
gary at the end of the year, misery, and a collection among the other 
impoverished ones to send the bankrupt home. I know that this is 
poor saving on the part of the government. If those extravagant 
fees were cut down, such as are received by the Sergeant-at-Arms of 
the House, and officials with perquisites, and if the useless office- 
holders were discharged, the salaries of really useful clerks could be 
advanced to suit the times, without loss to the government. Mean- 
ness is not econonry. The excess of single men in government ser- 
vice has led to a social debauchery. The back alleys of the town 
swarm with the abandoned, and these are supported upon the wages 
of men too poor to marry, but human enough to sin. 

This is the testimony of the Secretary of the Interior, who 
said : — 

" The income of office will not equal the outlay, if the incumbent 
lives in a style at all compatible with the proprieties of his position, 



236 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

and the relations which a decent regard to to the just claims of soci- 
ety compel him to maintain. The high offices of the country should 
be open to' the poor as well as to the rich ; but the practical effect of 
the present rate of compensation will soon be to exclude from execu- 
tive councils all who have not ample resources independently of their 
official salaries. 

" It is a singular and disreputable anomaly, that the chiefs of bureaux 
of the War Department each received in pay and emoluments, during 
the last fiscal year, a larger compensation than the Chief Justice of 
the United States. Recent legislation recognized the just claims of 
the Judges of the District Courts, and of the Supreme Court of this 
District ; but Congress, in the absence of political pressure, omitted 
to make a becoming provision for the Justices of the Supreme Court 
of the United States." 

The same Secretary made this suggestion : — 

u The proposition to erect and furnish houses for the Vice-President 
and Cabinet ministers may not meet with more favor now than when 
it was originally made. I earnestly recommend, therefore, that fifty 
per centum be added to their present salary, and to the Justices of 
the Supreme Court. It will even then be much less than is allowed 
to officers of a similar grade, by any other first-class government. 
The cabinet ministers will not receive more than is now paid, in 
coin, to several of our foreign representatives, who discharge much 
less laborious duties, in capitals not more expensive than Washing- 
ton. Since the salaries in question were fixed at the present rate, 
Congressmen have, by successive statutes, nearly quadrupled their 
own, and I do not doubt that the members of that honorable body 
will render, in some degree, to others, the justice already secured 
to themselves." 

To show how small salaries debauch public officers, let me cite the 
following statement of an old office-holder, at Washington, to whom 
I applied for information as to the difference between the nominal 
salaries of government officials and their actual incomes : — 

" State Department : the salary of the Secretary is eight thousand 
dollars a } T ear, but he actually costs the government nearer eighty 
thousand dollars a year. 

" Many of the clerks about the establishment never think of mov- 
ing without retainers, and poor^ devils, why should they? for the aver- 
age nominal salary of State Department clerks is about fifteen hundred 
dollars. Think of it, thirty dollars a week ! thirty dollars a week in a 



OFFICES, ETC., IN AMERICA AND IN ENGLAND. 237 

city where the whole of this sum is demanded for the merest accom- 
modation ; and yet a clerk in the State Department is liable to make 
the acquaintance of Ministers Plenipotentiary, and of Secretaries of 
Legation. In fact, the affairs of our State Department can be known 
to almost any prying foreigner, who has only to apprize himself of 
the necessities of a State Department clerk, to find the key to the 
bottom of our archives. There is a gentleman of the State Depart- 
ment, whom I know, with a salary of, say forty dollars a week. He 
has, according to the best of my information, about ten children ; 
this gentleman I believe to be a faithful and devoted servant of his 
Department.yet his salary, reduced to gold, is about six pounds a week, 
and, reduced to English marketing, it is about three pounds a week. 
Now, to bring disgust to the face of a confidential clerk of the Eng- 
lish Foreign Office, tell him that his correspondent in America 
receives three pounds a week to do plenty of work, and keep his 
counsel. 

" We have had some good foreign secretaries in our country, but 
as things stand at present it is a rich man's office. Seward, probably 
our best secretary, got even with his mean salary, by going freely 
into the pleasures of office ; his printing at the congressional office 
cost the government considerably more than Lord Stanley's salary, 
and the pleasant old gentleman would hardly cross the river to 
Arlington, without getting the loan of Welles' most luxurious steam- 
er. Looking upon his salary as zero, he gave bountiful encourage- 
ment to the Atlantic Telegraph, and to the Foreign Steamship com- 
panies, and an American hardly ever went abroad but he met some 
jolly bearer of despatches for the State Department, watching the 
can-can at the Ball Mabille, and assisting our formidable Secretary 
of State to help somebody to get something for his keeping the 
United States out of a foreign war. 

"As to Mr. Gideon Welles, about whom I have just spoken, peo- 
ple say that he was not a very efficient officer. History will not join 
in this verdict, but he was so poor, after serving the government 
eight years, that he had to fire up a fine vessel-of-war to take his 
household furniture from Washington to New London. 

" In the hottest time of the war, when to know which way Mr. 
Stanton's nose turned up was worth a thousand dollars an hour to 
contract-hunters, the salary of clerks stood at a starvation figure, 
and yet fifty per cent, of these clerks were under temptation to 
reveal the secrets of their bureaux. 



238 THE NEW WOULD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

" I can tell you two or three cases, but you will not care to print 
them, because you can hear of thousands of the same kind in a day's 
excursion around Washington. 

" There was Th , a first-class penman and book-keeper who had 

been turned out of the Interior Department for political suppositions, 
and he became so poor, in 1862, that he went to the wharves on the 
Potomac and got a job as a stevedore on an army supply vessel. 
When he had worked there like a Mick for several months, the 
quartermaster, an old brute, came out one day and asked, with an 

oath, if there was any man in the gang who could write. Th 

spoke out ; accoutred as he was, he plunged in, made a magnificent 
assistant, and for all his labor and responsibility received what? 

" Six hundred and fifty dollars a year ! 

" Amongst the contract-hunters who came to that wharf was a 
shipping merchant from a northern city. He became acquainted with 
Th 's condition and ability ; the government clerk and the mer- 
chant struck a partnership. In eighteen months Th was worth 

eighty thousand dollars, and this was not probably a third part of the 
gains of his moneyed partner. 

" Here somebody made two hundred thousand dollars ; here some- 
thing lost it. I think it was the mean nation, which paid a man 
thirteen dollars a week, when he had thirteen chances a day to hook 
thirteen thousand. 

" Need I remind you of the case of } r oung , a navy clerk, 

who obtained more than a hundred thousand dollars by forgery, which 
required him to imitate about thirty names on each set of a series of 
warrants, which ran through two months. He was in love with a 
beautiful girl ; his salary was a thousand dollars a year ; he was 
liable to be chucked out of place to-morrow, though he did his best. 
He hooked the money ; he married the girl ; they took him almost 
from her side at the altar to the penitentiary. 

" Of course he was a regular bad 'un, but how did he get into the 
government service? and what an accident that they got him out ! 

u On which hobservation, ask Mr. Jenckes of Rhode Island". 

" And now, my dear sir, to come to the Treasury, I feel as if I 
were measuring up the ocean in a gill measure to try to tell you the 
stories of its civil list with one steel pen. 

" Go there, and on a marble plate in a prominent room, printed at 
his own suggestion in golden letters, you will see a name amongst 
several, which is an index to the kind of precocious villainy which 



OFFICES, ETC., IN AMERICA AND IN ENGLAND. 239 

storms the party-caucus and manages the civil services. Mention it 
to any observer in Washington, and he will say, ' Dog ! he enriched 
himself upon plundered cotton ; he used his office merely to catalogue 
the claims against the Treasury, and resigned it to prosecute them.' 
In this case original sin was doubtless sufficient to account for the 
man, but had he been hauled into court, and made to face the peni- 
tentiary, his plea of excuse would have been : — 

" ' Good people, how could I maintain my honors with my appear- 
ance and thirty -five hundred dollars a year ? ' " 

Here I leave my ancient office-holder and correspondent. He 
writes not elegantly perhaps, but with a cheerful indignation which 
may bring this subject home to the reader. In the civil service of 
our government are many accomplished and faithful men, to whom a 
civil service bill would be a relief, a social promotion, and better 
compensation. It is well known that the executive departments are 
overcrowded b}^ the unscrupulous greed of merely political Congress- 
men to pension their retainers, and worse, upon the Federal service. 
The people must cry out for this reform ; it might be called the vital 
reform of all the reforms needed. With the drones out of govern- 
ment service we could afford to pay the true clerks well, and the Ex- 
ecutive Departments would cease to be mere soup-houses, where the 
unworthy crowd out the poor. 

The English government has passed through this question, and the 
reformed civil service has proved to be a decency and a blessing on 
which J:he whole kingdom applauds itself; scrupulous, intelligent, 
orderly, patriotic, working clerks have replaced the old party hacks, 
and the vast clerical operations of the British kingdom are responsi- 
bly conducted by gentlemen almost as well paid as the clerks of pri- 
vate employers. 

In the account of London offices, above given, little is said about 
their architecture ; but as a rule they are not finer buildings than 
our own. 

The building of the General Post Office in London stands in the 
densest part of the old city, near St. Paul's Cathedral ; it is a fine 
building, but not more remarkable than the General Post Office in 
Washington. Generall}' considered, the public offices of London do 
not present as imposing appearances as the departments at Washing- 
ton ; all great London buildings, whether constructed of marble or 
granite, tarnish and blacken in that sooty atmosphere, while the 
public buildings of Washington compare in size and style with 



240 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

the largest of the world, yet keep almost as white as if freshly 
erected. 

One of the largest public offices in London is called the Somerset 
House. It stands upon the Strand, or on the bank of the Thames, and 
contains several of the greatest offices of the government. The In- 
land or Internal Revenue Office occupies nearly one-half of the build- 
ing ; the Audit Office and part of the Admiralty and several other 
bureaux are established here. About nine hundred government offi- 
cials have desks in Somerset House, and their combined salaries are 
nearly one million and a half of dollars a year. The leading Com- 
missioner of Internal Revenue gets the highest salary in the building, 
or twelve thousand five hundred dollars a year ; the same officer in 
the United States receives six thousand dollars a year. In the base- 
ment of Somerset House are presses and fonts of type to make 
stamps, stamped labels, etc. So large is Somerset House that it con- 
tains thirty-six hundred windows. 

Another great government office in London is Burlington House, 
formerly the residence of a nobleman, situated on the street called 
Piccadilly ; it covers one hundred and forty-three thousand square 
feet of ground, and cost seven hundred thousand dollars in gold. 

It is not one of the good signs of the times in America that everybody 
wants office, and the unscrupulous methods by which offices are ob- 
tained strikes every stranger at Washington. " A universal thirst 
after salaried public employ ment," says Montalembert, " is the worst 
of all social maladies ; it infects the whole body politic with a venal 
and servile humor, which in no way excludes, even among those who 
may be the best paid, the spirit of faction and anarchy. It creates 
a crowd of hungry suitors, capable of every excess to satisfy their 
longings, and fit instruments for every base purpose as soon as they 
are in place. A population of place-hunters is the most despicable 
of all people. There is no ignominy of which it is not capable." 




MONUMENTAL STRUCTURES. 

1— Alexander Column, St. Petersburg. 2— Column Vendome. 3— Arc De Triomphe, Paris. 

4— Bunker Hill Monument. 5— Washington Monument. 0— Statue of Columbus. 



CHAPTER IX. 

NATIONAL ART AND EDUCATION. 

The schools, universities, and institutions of art and literature in England and America. — 
A particular account of Oxford and Cambridge. 

"We have now reached a subject in which the extremes of poverty 
and munificence are manifested by our country. Compared with 
Great Britain, or, indeed, with any modern nation, we are splendidly 
endowed with elementary schools, and enjoy in cheap and convenient 
variety all the advantages of public libraries and popular literature. 
The American people give voluntary and general support to the 
printing-press, which may be called the main engine of republicanism. 
But to the very highest developments of education, and to monumental 
art, the State does not think it wise to extend its organized assistance. 
TVe are, therefore, in the infancy of a great state, if measured by our 
architectural monuments and by our largest universities. The de- 
mands of the period with us are not for culture, but for usefulness. 
The most imposing of our institutions is, perhaps, the Patent Office, 
— that mighty depository of the mechanical triumphs of our nation, 
displayed in the course of our grand campaign toward reducing the 
wilderness and utilizing the products of the ground. But the most 
thorough and beneficent of our general institutions is, undoubtedly, 
our vast system of common schools ; for which we tax the people, in 
lieu of the grievous church-rates levied upon unwilling millions of 
Englishmen. 

In 1865 there were twelve thousand nine hundred and fifty schools, 
or departments of schools, for the" laboring classes in all Great Brit- 
ain, taught by about twelve thousand teachers, and attended by one 
million two hundred and forty-six thousand children. 

In the State of New York, alone, in 1862, there were one million 
hree hundred and twenty-three thousand scholars of the public 
schools. 

The British government made the first grant for general education 
in the year 1834 ; the sum was one hundred thousand dollars. In 
31 241 



242 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

1853 the vote of money was one million three hundred thousand dol- 
lars, and at present it amounts to three million dollars and more a 
year. In twenty-three years the government has spent thirty-four 
million dollars for educational purposes, of which two-thirds went to 
the Church of England's schools, and the rest was distributed amongst 
the dissenting denominations and Catholics. Public schools in Eng- 
land are called National Schools ; and educational administration in 
England is confided to the Education Department, — a branch of the 
Privy Council, — but the actual work is done by its Secretary, and a 
large number of Inspectors. The latter are paid two thousand two 
hundred and fifty dollars a year each, with travelling expenses, while 
the Secretary of the Committee receives six thousand dollars a 
year. America has a stronger exhibit to make. 

There were more than one hundred and thirteen thousand schools 
in America in 1860, employing one hundred and forty-nine thousand 
teachers, and attended by nearly five and a half millions of scholars, 
and nearly five millions of these scholars attended the public schools. 
There were in America, besides, twenty-seven thousand seven hundred 
and thirty libraries, containing about thirteen and a half millions of 
volumes, and four thousand and fifty-one newspapers, circulating nine 
hundred and twenty-eight millions of copies a year. There were, also, 
four hundred and forty-five colleges in America, in 1860, attended by 
fifty-five thousand students. 

Nearly the whole of this noble system of schools is the work, not 
of the nation, but of the separate States and cities ; for the general 
government leaves to the people, in their corporate capacities, the 
regulation of all those affairs not strictly delegated to the Federal 
State. In Great Britain the State is made the encourager and con- 
servator of education and art, as well as of industry, and the public 
schools feel the contact of this patronage. The National Schools of 
England are little more than pauper institutions, and take hold of the 
popular affections as do the work-houses and the agencies of out-of- 
door relief. But the common schools of the United States, main- 
tained by the will of the people, partake of our republican spirit, and 
are comparable to the best private schools in the world. The sons 
of the rich are sent to them as well as the sons of the poor, and in 
this way the successive generations of the republic begin, equalized 
in charity, nationalized in manners, and taught to remember the 
rights of all and to be self-reliant, rather than to depend upon adven- 
titious conditions. Into this great hopper of the public schools every 



NATIONAL ART AND EDUCATION. 243 

immigrant or native mother pours her children. They emerge with 
all their original individualities, but bereft of most of their supersti- 
tions and arrogances, ready to take their places in the line of citizen- 
ship. 

Education in England, as I have said, is not managed by the cities 
or the States as with us ; it is a national affair, and is managed by a 
Committee of the effete Privy Council. Upon this Committee sit the 
Lord President of the Council, the Secretary of State, the Chancellor 
of the Exchequer, and four other eminent members of the government. 

About three millions and a half of dollars are now voted for na- 
tional schools, to which the children of citizens in middle life seldom 
go ; and, with the usual regard paid in England to authority, the 
school-teachers frequently have residences built for them. 

The Secretary of the British Education Board receives a salary of 
six thousand dollars a j 7 ear, and there are a great number of School 
Inspectors, who receive, besides travelling expenses, two thousand 
two hundred and fifty dollars a year apiece. 

At the Philadelphia High School, which was one of the best insti- 
tutions of its kind in America, the Principal is paid only two thou- 
sand two hundred dollars a year, and has no official residence. In 
fact, no officials in America are given official residences, except the 
President and some of the State Governors. 

When Washington city was planned, spaces were left to accommo- 
date the different States with sites for residences for their Senators 
and Representatives. None of the States, and none of the Congres- 
sional Districts have been generous enough to avail themselves of 
these opportunities, and, as a consequence, many members of Con- 
gress, and even some of the cabinet officers, are unable to bring their 
wives to Washington city. Licentiousness is, therefore, said to 
abound under the shadow of the Capitol, and we have it on the au- 
thority of a Senator, that one of the Representatives from one of the 
greatest whiskey-distilling districts in the United States recently 
turned his house into a gambling-saloon, and there plundered his 
friends whom he had invited under his roof. 

In the year I860, before slavery was abolished, one person in six 
of the entire American population attended school. Since that time 
a noble series of elementary schools have been established in the 
South by the Freedmen's Bureau, and by the magnificent bequest of 
Mr. George Peabody, an American banker, of London, who had pre- 
viously endowed the latter city with cheap lodging-houses. The need 



244 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

in England is for life, for shelter ; the cry in America is for light, for 
schools. In the year I860 there were one million two hundred and 
eighteen thousand persons in the United States who could not read 
and write. Of these not quite one-half, or about one person in forty 
of the native population, were native Americans. 

The condition of the people is far different in Great Britain. A 
recent report of the British Registrar-General shows that thirty-two 
and seven-tenths per cent, of the male minors who married in 1841 
were obliged to sign the register with marks. This proportion di- 
minished year by year till 1866, when it was twenty-three per cent. 
The progress of education among women has been still greater. In 
1841 forty-eight and eight-tenths per cent, of minors were unable to 
write their names ; but in 1867 there were only twenty-three per cent. 
In the whole quarter of a century, from 1842 till 1866, the proportion 
of men who write has risen from being only two-thirds to be three- 
fourths, and of women, from being a half to be two-thirds. But the 
spread of education over the kingdom has been very unequal. It 
appears from a Parliamentary return, issued in the session of 1867, 
that more than a third of the Welchmen who married in the year 
1865 had to " make their mark ; " very nearly a third of the men of 
Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire, and Norfolk were put to the same 
predicament; more than a third of the men of Suffolk, thirty-five per 
cent, of the men of Bedfordshire, thirty-eight per-cent. of the men of 
Staffordshire, and forty per cent, of the men of Monmouthshire. In 
all Lancashire one man in every four who married had to " make his 
mark." Foremost among the ignorant districts, so far as concerns 
women, stands South Wales, with more than half its women unable 
to write their names ; and in North Wales, Monmouthshire, Stafford- 
shire, and Lancashire the number exceeds forty-six in one hundred. 
In Bedfordshire, two women in every five who married in 1865 had 
to make their mark. In the eastern counties, and in man}^ counties in 
the southern half of England, more women signed the marriage reg- 
ister in 1865 than men. 

With regard to the British army the proportion of ignorant men is 
not less formidable. Of every thousand recruits examined in the year 
1864 in English districts, two hundred and thirty-nine were unable to 
read or write, thirty-seven able to read only, and seven hundred and 
twenty-four able to read and write. In Scotch districts the numbers 
were respectively, one hundred and sixty-three, one hundred and fifty- 
seven, and six hundred and eighty. In Irish districts the result ap- 



v NATIONAL AET AND EDUCATION. 245 

pears as three hundred and eighteen, one hundred and four, and five 
hundred and seventy-eight. Compared with the results for 1861, 
there is a decrease in the proportion of uneducated in England, but 
scarcely any difference in Scotland and Ireland. 

There is no more remarkable indication of the need of public or 
common education in England than the numerous dialects which per- 
vade the rural counties. Many of these are not merely the mal-pro- 
n unci at ion of habit, or the terms of locality, but coarse and harsh 
vocabularies, unintelligible to English-speaking people. Even in 
London, the large population called ".Cockneys" speak a dialect not 
above the elegance of an American negro slave's in former days. 
Wherever one goes, throughout the British Islands, he finds dense 
ignorance, rude or servile mannerisms, and gross appetites. A small 
portion of the people are educated far above the needs of magna- 
nimity, and they, despise their common countrymen, while the poor are 
thrown together in parish or National Schools, unleavened inmost 
cases by the companionship of the children of the better classes. By 
these strong walls, built between the various grades of childhood, the 
" conservatism" of England is thought to be secured ; but it is the 
pride of a wealthy American father, in all but exceptional cases, to 
commit his son to the public teacher, and let him enter into competi- 
tion with the average human nature on trial there. The result has 
proved, according to the best testimony, that there is less selfishness, 
haughtiness, and vice in the American common schools than at Eton 
or Harrow, the nurseries of the British aristocracy. 

There were in America, in 1860, in addition to the scholars of the 
public schools, nearly half a million lads and girls attending private 
academies, of which latter there were nearly seven thousand estab- 
lished. There were, besides, upwards of four hundred and fifty incor- 
porated colleges attended by fifty-six thousand students. These 
academies and colleges, collectively, had an annual income of more 
than twelve millions of dollars. These institutions are not associated 
with the public school systems of the different States ; many of them 
are richly endowed by religious bodies, by the legislatures of the 
States, or by private benefactors. Almost every State has one or 
more universities, and those of some of the newest of the States 
compare favorably with the best in the land. Amongst the most 
flourishing and individual of these schools are the University of 
Michigan, at Ann Arbor, the Cornell University, at Ithaca, New York, 
and Oberlin College, in the State of Ohio. Taken together, the pri- 



246 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

vate or pay schools of the United States are, alone, probably more 
numerous and better attended than the private schools of England. 
Counting our vast system of public education at nothing, the pay 
schools of America match those of Great Britain, omitting the Brit- 
ish National Schools. The American colleges of some single States, 
if collected into groups or universities, would outnumber the colleges 
of Oxford and Cambridge together. Ohio, for example, has forty-five 
colleges, with more than seven thousand students. All New England 
is in one point of view a grand acadenrv, to which go scholars from 
all parts of the republic. In England there are particular schools of 
great antiquity and of rich revenues, which engage in the preparation 
of bo}^s for college ; a few of these may be enumerated. 

Christ's Hospital in London, otherwise known as the Blue Coat 
School, is purely a charitable establishment ; the pupils have retained 
their distinctive dress, a blue gown, yellow leggins, and no hat, ever 
since its foundation, and are obliged to wear this dress continuously, 
even in vacation. At the universities these charity scholars are 
known by their long hair. Charles Lamb went to this school, as well 
as Coleridge and Leigh Hunt. Its revenues are more than three hun- 
dred thousand dollars annually. At the opposite end of London, 
beside Westminster Abbey, is a school of a very different sort ; it is 
called Westminster, and was once the Court School ; for a long time 
it rivalled Eton, but was lately reported to be in a terrible state of 
decay. " The position of the school in the heart of a great city," says 
a critic, " had doubtless something to do with corrupting the boys' 
morals, but would not entirely account for their low and ungentle- 
manly habits ; nor could their general ignorance of everything but 
vice be attributed to any other cause than gross neglect on the part 
of those who had control Over them.'* At this school were trained 
Ben Jonson, Cowper, Gibbon, Lord John Russell, and many boys 
destined to greatness ; the institution is three hundred years old. 

Charter House School, in London, was the nursery of John Wesley, 
Thackeray, Blackstone, and Havelock ; it was founded in the year 
1611. I visited it in 1863, and found the names of Martin and John 
Van Buren on its registry book. At St. Paul's School, under the 
shadow of the great cathedral, were educated Milton and Marlborough. 
The two most renowned country schools in England are those of 
Harrow and of Eton, the latter situated close by the Queen's palace 
of Windsor. Harrow has the reputation of being a great place for 
the quasi-aristocracy, — the sons of rich commoners, — as Eton is 



NATIONAL ART AND EDUCATION. 247 

for the sons of noblemen. Eton was founded fifty years before the 
discovery of America ; at present it has nearly eight hundred schol- 
ars, and is richly endowed. Here were scholars many future prime 
ministers, and great churchmen and soldiers : Wellington, Hallem, 
Chatham, Fox, Canning, and Admiral Lord Howe. 

The best idea an American reader can get of these British schools 
and of the two great universities will be afforded by Charles Astor 
Bristed's " Five } r ears at an English University, " and for pleasant, 
pure reading there are no books more popular than those of Mr. 
Thomas Hughes, " Tom Brown at Rugby School," and " Tom Brown 
at Oxford." The first of these books is a conscientious account 
of an American boy's experience at Cambridge, and I have availed 
nryself of it freely in describing life at that great university. 

American criticism is generally adverse to the social life of English 
schools, as indeed is much of the ingenuous portrayal of the same 
by the late English novelists. 

The Etonian boys of nineteen are as old in appearance as the New 
Yorkers or Bostonians of twenty-one. They all wear white cravats 
and men's black beavers ; caps are forbidden ; to be an " Eton man" 
is a badge of high-breeding though not always of good-breeding. The 
school, perched on the Thames by the base of Windsor, is a sort of 
juvenile court. A feature of all these schools is the interest endowed 
for them in the great universities. Out of its seven hundred odd 
pupils only about one-tenth are collegers. These collegers are the 
nucleus of the whole Etonian system, and the only original part of it, 
the paying pupils (called oppedans, or town boys) being, according 
to general belief, an after-growth. The collegers are educated gra- 
tuitously, and such of them as have nearly but not quite reached the 
age of nineteen are elected, when a vacancy occurs, to go to King's 
College at Cambridge, and they are there provided for during life, or 
until marriage. 

Amongst the many colleges of America there are two which have 
heretofore taken precedence over all others, by reason of their age 
and fine endowments, and by the eminence of their alumni. A long 
day's ride from Washington city, but little further from New York 
than is Oxford from the city of London, stands Yale College, in the 
pleasant town* of New Haven, the city of the Elms, — a series of 
venerable or modern buildings in the green public squares, with 
churches and houses of justice or legislation intermixed. 

Yale College, like Harvard, is named for a private benefactor, 



248 THE NEW WOELD COMPARED WITH THE OLD* 

Elihu Yale, who was born at New Haven in 1648, and lies buried at 
Wrexham, in North Wales. He quitted America when a child> and 
never returned to Connecticut ; he rose to be governor of the East 
India Company, and became rich ; his united bequest to Yale College 
amounted, however, to only about five hundred pounds. The concep- 
tion and infancy of the college date back about one hundred and 
eighty years ; but the earliest of the present buildings at New Haven 
were finished about the year 1780. Nearly eight thousand persons 
had graduated at New Haven up to the year 1862 ; there were about 
forty-five instructors in the college at that time and six hundred 
students. As at Harvard, there is an academic department at Yale, 
besides colleges of law, science, medicine, and theology. There are 
forty thousand books in the college library, besides several subsidiary 
libraries belonging to societies. The alumni of the college have made 
it several handsome bequests, — more than two hundred thousand dol- 
lars having been given in two separate subscriptions. Yale, however, 
is not so richly endowed as Harvard. It is, if not more conservative 
in politics than Harvard, more conservative in its religion, still adher- 
ing to the forms and doctrines of the Congregational Church. In 
both these great American universities there is a radical and a staid 
faction, contending for their control ; at present the more radical 
university seems to be about as far ahead as Oxford outstrips Cam- 
driclge in material things ; but both these universities are firmly es- 
tablished, and their interior policy and regimen attract almost as 
much attention in America, as do Oxford and Cambridge in Eng- 
land. 

It would be very pleasant in this chapter to sketch the pleasant 
College of Dartmouth, in the lowlands of New Hampshire ; the Uni- 
versity of Pennsylvania, in the heart of the great city of Philadelphia ; 
Brown University, on the heights above Narragansett Bay, and Ithaca 
University, on the green slope of Cayuga Lake. I have only room, 
however, for an outline of the American Cambridge. 

Three miles from Boston city, on the banks of the broad, brackish 
River Charles, in the midst of the pleasant suburb of Cambridge, 
stands Harvard University. The town of Cambridge was named 
after Cambridge in England, by the founders of the college which 
stands here, many of whom had graduated at the English University 
of that name. Cambridge town, in England, at the present time, is 
probably not as populous as Cambridge in Massachusetts. Several 
years ago the two Cambridges had but about two thousand difference 



NATIONAL ART AND EDUCATION* 249 

in population. John Harvard was born in Middlesex County, Eng- 
land, the county in which London stands, in 1638. He died at Charles- 
town, Massachusetts, and left about eight hundred pounds to found a 
college, and also a small library ; but Cambridge University was 
really the work of the settlers of Boston and the town round about ; 
it properly began six years after the settlement of the Boston region. 
This college received a limited State support down to the } 7 ear 1814 ; 
but the bulk of its wealth was the gift of private individuals. It has 
received bequests amounting to more than one million of dollars ; in 
its library are about one hundred and twenty-five thousand volumes. 
There are more than a dozen large buildings upon the fourteen acres 
which constitute its premises, and one of its colleges is in Boston city. 
It has about seven hundred and fifty students, generally speaking. 
In theology it is generally considered a Unitarian institution ; but the 
sentiment of its undergraduates, alumni, and patrons has grown 
more and more progressive, until at present its President is a young 
man, and its overseers and corporation belong to what is called the 
advanced or youthful party, in politics, philosophy, and religion. . 

From Yale and Harvard let us turn to the two ancient universities 
of England. 

Cambridge is fifty-seven miles from London. Oxford is fifty-two 
miles from London. Cambridge dates back to about the year 1230, 
a.d. Oxford is said to have been a seat of learning as early as the 
year 802, a.d. 

The Associations of both Oxford and Cambridge are scholastic, 
and historical in a high degree. Cromwell three times represented 
Cambridge in the House of Commons, and Bacon, Newton, Coke, 
Dryden, and Byron were among the graduates of this venerable 
university. At Oxford were burned Ridle}^, Latimer, and Cranmer, 
the earliest Bishops of the English Church. The library at Cam- 
bridge contains more than two hundred thousand volumes ; the Bod- 
leian Library, at Oxford, contains nearly three hundred thousand 
volumes. The revenue of Oxford is two million three hundred thou- 
sand dollars in gold, a year. It has thirty-five professors, numerous 
tutors, six hundred " Fellows/' and thirteen hundred students. The 
revenue of the university -proper, however, is only about thirty-eight 
thousand dollars a year ; the rest going to separate colleges, to pri- 
zes, and to fellowships. At Cambridge there are seventeen colleges. 
Government gives the professors about six thousand dollars a year, 
collectively, and the revenues of the university proper are thirty 
32 



250 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

thousand dollars a year. Both colleges have had magnificent 
, bequests. One museum, at Cambridge, is endowed with five hundred 
thousand dollars in gold, and one college has a separate library of 
fifty thousand volumes. Oxford has a magificent printing establish- 
ment and a theatre connected with it. At both colleges there are 
professorships of Arabic, Sanscrit, and other oriental branches. 
Both these universities originated in monastic schools, which, after 
a time, had secular imitators ; these latter hired inns, and other 
buildings, where they lived in association, with superintendents, 
stewards, and other officers appointed by themselves. From those 
poverty-stricken inns have grown up the vast series of colleges 
which constitute these two noble universities, both of which, by right 
of usefulness, of intelligence, and of propert}', are represented in 
the Parliament of Great Britain. For many 3'ears, Mr. Gladstone, 
the present enlightened Prime Minister, was elected by Oxford Uni- 
versity. 

The great University of Oxford possesses nineteen colleges, and 
five halls, presided over by their respective " Heads." The university 
has always been governed by statutes of its own making, which in 
1626 were digested into a code. 

The style of the corporation is, " The Chancellor, Masters, and 
Scholars of the University of Oxford." The Chancellor holds his 
office for life, is usually a nobleman of distinction, who has been a 
member of the university, is elected by the members of Convocation, 
and attends only on extraordinary occasions. The Vice-Chancellor, 
the highest resident officer, is annually nominated by the Chancellor 
from the Heads of Colleges, but of late has generally held office by 
reappointment for four years . He convenes all courts and meetings, 
enforces the laws, punishes delinquents, licenses taverns in the city, 
and is a magistrate for Oxford, Oxfordshire, and Berkshire. He 
appoints four deputies, or pro-vice-chancellors, from the Heads of 
Colleges, who exercise his power when he is unwell, or necessarily 
absent from the university. 

The following are the names of the colleges composing the 
Universities of Oxford, with the students, as reported a few years 
ago: — 

University, 72 

Balliol, 101 

Merton, 45 

Exeter, 171 



NATIONAL ART AND EDUCATION. 



251 



Oriel, 
Queen's, . 
New, 
Lincoln, . 
All Souls, 
Magdalene, 
Brasenose, 
Corpus, . 
Christ Church, 
Trinity, . 
St. John's, 
Jesus, 
"Wadham, 
Pembroke, 
Worcester, 



87 
63 
34 
40 
4 
55 
99 
47 
211 
81 
49 
44 
72 
6(> 
68 



Halls: — 



St. Mary's, 18 

Magdalene, • . 73 

New Inn, 6 

St. Albau, 9 

St. Edmund, 22 

Litton's, 5 



Balliol, judged by the standard of the class lists, and University 
prizes, is a far better college than Christ Church, or Brasenose, or, 
indeed, any other in Oxford. 

Take one college at Oxford, to example the rest, — Christ Church : 
It was commenced by Cardinal Wolsey, in 1526, but when the King 
disgraced him, the former seized the funds appropriated to build- 
ing the college, and changed its name from Cardinal's to King's. 
One side of this college is four hundred feet long, broken in the cen- 
tre by a bold gateway, over which rises a tower and dome, containing 
a bell which weighs seventeen thousand pounds, and whose clapper 
weighs three hundred and forty-two pounds ; every night, at ten min- 
utes after nine, this bell, by one hundred and one strokes, gives notice 
to all the colleges to close their gates. 

The gateway under the great bell leads into avast court, more than 
two hundred and forty feet square, and surrounded with superb archi- 
tecture ; in the centre of the court plays a fountain, and from one 
corner of it, where stands a statue of Cardinal Wolsey, a beautiful 
staircase leads to the College Hall, which is one hundred and fifteen 



252 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

feet long, forty feet wide, and fifty feet high, and finished by Wol- 
sey himself. In this hall the English sovereigns are received when 
they visit Oxford, and many plays have been enacted here before the 
kings. A Cathedral is attached to this college, and fine stone cloisters. 
A magnificent Portrait Gallery, of historical personages associated 
with this college, is one of its attractions. A meadow of fifty acres 
extends from the college to the pleasant river's brink, and prome- 
nades under elm-trees lead to the junction of the Cherwell and Isis, 
where lie moored the barges from which the collegians cheer the 
racing-boats, while the green meadows are on racing days crowded 
with spectators. From this college Locke was expelled ; here Cranmer 
was confined before his execution ; here William Penn attacked the 
Christ Church students, and tore their white surplices from their backs. 

These are but a few of the larger features of this magnificent college, 
which is replete with exquisite patches of stained glass, and quaint 
or florid sculpturing. An American scholar can spend a month in 
Oxford, inspecting Christ's Church and other colleges, and here, in 
1869, appeared many of our Yale and Harvard boys, to watch the 
university boat race between Harvard and Oxford. In and around 
all these colleges will be seen the students in their academical cos- 
tumes, which are not worn in America except on show occasions, and 
then in a very modest and reduced form. 

The English academical costume consists of a gown, varying in 
color and ornament according to the wearer's college and rank, but 
generally black, not unlike an ordinary clerical gown, and a square- 
topped cap, which fits close to the head like a truncated helmet, 
while the covered board which forms the crown measures about a 
foot diagonally across. To steal caps and gowns is no more an 
offence against the eighth commandment, in Cambridge, than to steal 
umbrellas. 

A remarkable class of men at the English universities are the 
"Fellows," who reside in the university, and devote themselves to 
teaching or to learning. The Fellows, who form the general body 
from which the other college officers are chosen, consist of those four 
or five Bachelor scholars in each year who pass the best examination 
in classics, mathematics, and metaphysics. This examination being a 
severe one, and only the last of many trials which they have gone 
through, the inference is allowable that they are the most learned of 
the college graduates. They have a handsome income, whether resi- 
dent or not ; but if resident, enjoy the additional advantages of a well- 



NATIONAL ART AND EDUCATION. 253 

spread table for nothing, and good rooms at a very low price. The 
only conditions of retaining their fellowships are that they take or- 
ders after a certain time, and remain unmarried. Of those who do 
not fill college offices, some occupy themselves with private pupils ; 
others, who have property of their own. prefer to live a life of literary 
leisure, like some of their predecessors, the monks of old. The eight 
oldest Fellows at any time in residence, together with the Master, 
have the government of the college vested in them. We have no such 
leisurely class in America ; all who live in the college are under- 
graduates. Yet it might be well for our literature if some such fel- 
lowships were attached to our universities, that some excellent 
students might have leisure for authorship. There are, nevertheless, 
many drones and hangers-on about the English universities. 

Oxford has numerous professors, who are utterly unoccupied. They 
are engaged in spasmodic efforts at getting hearers, and are forced, 
against their will, into lazy apathy. " As a whole," says one critic, 
" the public teaching of the university is unwillingly contemptible. 

" One must either pity the men who have no one to teach, or one 
must despise the men who continue the same functional gabble to 
successive aspirants for a certificate. 

" Some of the ablest Oxford professors lecture to women and 
strangers. I have gone in to a lecture on a subject of the profound- 
est interest, and I have seen there three or four Fellows, and so forth, 
of the lecturer's college, one or two citizens, and an ambitious under- 
graduate, who took notes for ten minutes, and slept for fifty. It is 
in vain that founders of professorships annex penalties to a slovenly 
performance of public offices." 

The sums of money invested in these fellowships is very great. 
Rich men, dying, endow so many fellowships in this college. 

There is no less than a sum of four hundred thousand dollars per 
annum bestowed on those who desire, or receive, as the case may be, 
eleemosynary aid in Oxford as undergraduates. 

The annual value of the fellowships and college headships, build- 
ings included, is at least seven hundred thousand dollars. 

The annual value of ecclesiastical benefices connected with the 
colleges is at least one million dollars, and the income of the univer- 
sity, including its trust estates, according to one estimate, will bring 
the gross total to not much less than two million five hundred thou- 
sand dollars per annum. 

It was the case a few years ago, and probably will continue in the 



254 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

English universities, for the university to control much of the city in 
which it stands. The town officers are sworn in by, and subject to, 
the university authorities, and the Proctors have a right to enter 
almost any house or premises, put down all disorderly houses, and 
expel from the place all the notorious prostitutes, of whom there are 
many hundreds, as well known as if they were under a Parisian reg- 
istration. 

It may be that these sensual attractions partially account for the 
unproductiveness of many Oxford fellowships, for a recent graduate 
of Oxford says : — 

" I find my own university, the richest in the world, — far richer in 
its income than all the universities of continental Europe from St. 
Petersburg to Cadiz, — far behind, in its literary labors, some of the 
smallest of most modern establishments in the pettiest German prin- 
cipality or dukedom." 

The cost of education at Oxford, payable in gold, is fully twice as 
much as the combined fees at Yale or Harvard. It can rarely happen 
that the annual expenditure of an undergraduate's residence is less 
than one thousand dollars at Oxford, and, according to the best tes- 
timon}^, the opportunities to spend money there are very considerable, 
though, out of this annual expenditure, college bills amount only to 
between four hundred and five hundred dollars. These bills include 
tuition provided by the college, rent of rooms (unfurnished, the furni- 
ture being purchased and transferred on entering and leaving rooms) ; 
kitchen and buttery, — the former of these two providing dinner, 
the latter commons and beer. The college does not supply the under- 
graduate with tea, coffee, or sugar ; but most of the colleges arrange 
for the undergraduates' washing and coals, and these items are in- 
cluded in the bill. 

This is an outline sketch of the great University of Oxford, which 
is typical of the peculiar nation of which it is one of the ornaments. 
Its separate colleges have local and particular connections. 

For instance, Exeter College has a large w r est country connection, 
and a very considerable clerical one. 

Balliol and University are strongly occupied by a Scotch and north 
of England connection.' Jesus is almost entirely Welch. Trinity is 
powerfully Wykehamist. 

Queen's is eminently limited to Cumberland, Northumberland, and 
Westmoreland. Brasenose is a good deal beholden to Manchester, 
and so in their degree with the rest. 



NATIONAL ART AND EDUCATION. 255 

Down to 1832 there were in England but two ancient universities. 
In that year a university for the study of theology was founded in 
Durham. The Bishop of the diocese is the u visitor," and the Dean 
the " Warden." It is now attended chiefly by the sons of wealthy 
farmers. The London University was founded by royal charter on 
the 28th of November, 1836. It is empowered to confer the degrees 
of master of arts, and of doctor of laws, of medicine, and of science. 
There are two colleges in direct relation with it, namely, University 
and King's College. The Fellows and the Chancellor are nominated 
by the Queen ; the Vice-Chancellor by the Senate. 

The first view of Cambridge, town and university, is quite as 
quaint, if not as fine, architecturally, as Oxford. Like almost all 
old English towns there are narrow and winding streets of crazy old 
buildings, filled with ancient sign-boards. Among these narrow, ugly, 
and dirty streets are tumbled in, as it were at random, some of the 
most beautiful academical buildings in the world. However their 
style of architecture may vary, according to the period at which they 
were built or rebuilt, they agree in one essential feature : All the col- 
leges are constructed in quadrangles, or courts ; and, as in course of 
years the population of every college, except one, has outgrown the 
original quadrangle, new courts have been added, so that the larger 
foundations have three, and one has four, courts. Sometimes the 
11 old court," or primitive part of the building, presents a handsome 
front to the largest street near it ; but frequent!}', as if to show its 
independence of, and contempt for, the town, it retires from the street 
altogether, showing the passer-by only its ugliest wall and smallest, 
shabbiest gate. 

When Mr. Bristed appeared before this old university and selected 
the college he meant to attend, he wrote a very pithy description of 
the place : — 

" You enter by a portal neither particularly large nor very striking 
in its appearance, but rather the reverse, into a spacious and elegant 
square. There are neat grass-plots and walks, a fountain in the cen- 
tre ; on one side stands a well-proportioned chapel ; in one corner you 
catch a glimpse, through a tantalizing grating, of a beautiful garden, 
appropriated to the delectation of the authorities. In a second 
court you find sounding and venerable cloisters, perhaps a veritable 
structure of monkish times, if not, a satisfactory imitation of that 
period. And you look on the walls, here rich with sculptured orna- 
ment, there covered with trailing and festooning ivy." 



256 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

At Cambridge, as at Oxford, there are many colleges, and all these 
colleges have equal privileges and rights, with one exception ; and, 
though some of them are called halls, the difference is merely one of 
name. But the halls at Oxford, of which there are five, are not in- 
corporated bodies, and have no vote in university matters ; indeed, are 
but a sort of boarding-house, at which students may remain until it is 
time for them to take a degree. " I dined at one of those establish- 
ments," says Mr. Bristecl. " It was very like an officers' mess. The 
men had their own wine, and did not wear their gowns." 

Mr. Bristed spent five years at Cambridge, and it is his opinion that 
an English university course is far more thorough and effective than 
one at Yale or Harvard. 

"Were I to be questioned by an educated foreigner — an English- 
man, or Frenchman, German, Hollander, or Dane — upon the stand- 
ard of scholarship in our New England colleges and universities, I 
should be obliged to answer," he says, "not having the fear of the 
American public before my eyes, that it was exceedingly low, and 
that not merely according to his idea, but according to the idea of a 
boy fitted at a good school in New York. When I went up to Yale 
College in 1835, the very first thing that struck me was the classical 
deficiency of the greater part of the students and some of the instruc- 
tors. A great many of the freshmen had literally never heard of such 
a thing as prosody ; they did not know that there were any rules for 
quantity. It may be imagined what work they made with reading 
poetry. Nor could their teachers, in many instances, do much to help 
them. One of our classical tutors did not know the quantity of the 
middle syllable in profugus, — almost the first word in the JEneid. 
The etymological part of Greek grammar (to say nothing of the syn- 
tax) was very imperfectly understood by the majority, and of those 
who made pretensions to scholarship there were not ten in a class 
who could recite three consecutive sentences of decent Latin prose. 

" Yale is the largest college in our country, and one of the two 
most distinguished. The result of my inquiries has not led me to be- 
lieve that Harvard is any better off. That the other colleges through- 
out the country, many of which derive their instructors from these 
two great New England colleges, are, if anything, in a worse state, 
may be easily inferred." 

Mr. Bristed's testimony as to the relative morality of the English 
and the American universities is severely rendered against the former, 
and what he says will be confirmed by any traveller who is informed 



NATIONAL ART AND EDUCATION. 257 

upon the social life of the young men of the higher classes in the 
British Islands. 

The American graduate, who has been accustomed to find even 
among irreligious men a tolerable standard of morality, and an ingen- 
uous shame in relation to certain subjects, is utterly confounded at 
the amount of open profligacy going on all around him at an English 
university; a profligacy not confined to the "rowing" set, but in- 
cluding many of the reading men, and not altogether sparing those 
in authority. There is a careless and undisguised way of talking 
about gross vice, which shows that public sentiment does not strongly 
condemn it ; it is habitually talked of and considered as a thing from 
which a man may abstain through extraordinary frigidity of tempera- 
ment or high religious scruple, or merely as a bit of training with 
reference to the physical consequences alone ; but which is on the 
whole natural, excusable, and perhaps to most men necessaiy. Some 
instances of representative wickedness at Cambridge are of a sort to 
make an American turn up his eyes. Let me give them as cited from 
the authorities : — 

" You want to know what this row was between Lord Gaston and 
Brackett, — well, it happened this way : Brackett had brought his 
chere amie down from London. Gaston made her acquaintance. 
Brackett goes there one night and finds the door locked ; so he kicked 
the door open, and gave Gaston a black eye. Then Gaston wanted 
to challenge him, and said he didn't care whether he was turned out 
of the university or not (this is the penalty for being concerned in a 
duel) ; but his friends agreed that, as Brackett was going into the 
church, they had better make it up," etc. 

" A young woman of previous good character went to a fellow of 
King's College to procure an order of admission to the chapel on 
Sunday evening. ' He made her drunk and seduced her. The reader 
will probably agree with me, that if the corporation of King's had ex- 
pelled him from their body it would not have been a punishment 
beyond his deserts. What did they do? They suspended him from 
his fellowship for two years, which was equivalent to a fine of four 
thousand pounds or thereabout." 

Not less repulsive is it to an American to find English university 
students taking reactionary positions in politics. The same authority 
says : — 

" I first had full personal experience of the uncharitableness shown 
by these youthful Tories towards their liberal countrymen. Many of 
33 



258 THE NEW WOKLD COMPARED WITH. THE OLD. 

them, who seemed to have taken up the Romish idea that a blind 
devotion to their church establishment could atone for any irregular- 
ity in their lives, looked upon a Liberal as no better than a Dissenter, 
and a Dissenter as only one step above an Atheist. A professed 
Radical was regarded as a strange monster always to be suspected.'' 

It would be a grievous offence in the e} r es of American students if 
I omitted mention of the great rowing matches at the English univer- 
sities. At Oxford these take place upon the Isis ; at Cambridge, 
upon the Cam. The Cam being a very narrow stream, scarcely wider 
than a canal, it is impossible for the boats to race side by side. The 
following expedient has therefore been adopted : they are drawn up 
in a line, two lengths between each, and the contest consists in each 
boat endeavoring to touch with its bow the stern of the one before it, 
which operation is called bumping ; and at the next race the bumper 
takes the place of the bumped. The distance rowed is about one 
mile and three quarters. 

Yale and Harvard race each other upon the beautiful lake called 
Quinsigamond, near Worcester, Massachusetts, — a lake which is about 
half a mile wide. During the race on the Cam there is wonderful 
activity and excitement, and the river brink is alive with people and 
nags. One account says of the scene in racing week that, — 

" Men and horses ran promiscuously along the banks, occasionally 
interfering with each other. A dozen persons might have been 
trampled under foot, or sent into the Cam, and no one would have 
stopped to render them assistance. The cockswain of one of the 
boats looked the very personification of excitement ; he bent over at 
every pull till his nose almost touched the stroke's arm, cheering his 
men meantime at the top of his voice. The shouts rose louder and 
louder. ' Pull, Trinity ! ' ' Pull, Keys !"Go it, Trinity ! ' ' Keep on, 
Keys ! ' c Pull, stroke ! ' < Now, No. 3 ! ' ' Lay out, Greenwell ! ' For 
the friends of the different rowers began to appeal to them individu- 
ally. ' That's it, Trinity ! ' ' Where are you, Keys ? ' ' Hurrah, Trinity ! 
inity ! ! inity ! ! ! ' and the outcries of the Trinitarians waxed more 
and more boisterous and triumphant, as the men, with their long, 
slashing strokes, urged their boat closer and closer upon the enemy. 

" Cambridge was turned into a show place for that day only. Gold- 
embroidered gowns of noblemen mingled with the red gowns of 
Doctors of Divinity and Physic. Crowds of well-dressed strangers 
thronged the beautiful college grounds, looking as nnamused as the 
great Anglo-Saxon race usually does when it gets together in a crowd. 



NATIONAL ART AND EDUCATION. 259 

The Senate House was thronged. All manner of big-wigs graced the 
scene, and augmented the dignity of the Duke of Northumberland. 
Some one of the Royal Family was there, — I forget who, but recol- 
lect two officers pushing the people out of his way. Prince Albert 
came up to be made something or otjier, and put on some extraordi- 
nary dress. Illustrious foreigners were not wanting. Edward 
Everett and Baron Bunsen were created D. C. L.'s, and had red gowns 
put over their diplomatic uniforms. " The scandalous conduct of 
some members of Oxford University to our distinguished countryman, 
when the same degree was conferred on him there some time later, is 
notorious. 

In 1865 and '66 I wrote for the " New York World " accounts of the 
races at Lake Quinsigamond, and my companion was an Englishman, 
whom I may call Tom Brown. There were many cabs and stages 
between Worcester and the Lake, but quantities of strange vehicles 
also, which could be enumerated under no possible head, — buggies 
served up at the country blacksmith's, dearborns which might be laden 
with hay, but which creaked abominably under the human freight of 
the father of the family, peak-visaged, and calculating costs upon the 
rump of his horse, as upon a slate ; the old lady meditating apple- 
butter and the cost of education. 

With these went ponies and saddles, which ought to have been 
" fit into the revolutionary war," and furniture carts in which half- 
tipsy sons of sires were singing in their sleep. The road was undu- 
lating, and parallel with a railroad, and apart of the way went across 
some swampy bottoms, and at last struck a hill-top, whence the 
sweep of hills to the north and south was as beautiful as the roll 
of the West Riding moors. Below lay the lake, dark and shining like 
ebony, and to the right meandering among many islets, and every- 
where shadowing woods of chestnut and oak, but to the left, a single 
reach of unbroken water, rising straight to the further distance, 
where in the end of the perspective the buoy lay, like a white feather. 
A causeway divided this clear arm of the lake from the west, in 
which was an arch, through which a small steamboat was now pass- 
ing. 

Tom Brown saw all this at a glance, and that nature which beats 
down all reticence and prejudice brought from his lips an honest 
admission : — 

" I say ! this thing can't be beat, out of Westmoreland. Who the 
deuce wouldn't row his arms off here?" 



260 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

The carriages and nags were all collected along the causeway, and 
in the woods on either side ; a railway turn-off to the right was drop- 
ping passengers by hundreds, who filed across the meadows and the 
road, and went down a slope into the woods. The scene was orderly, 
yet animated, and nobody was visible who seemed to be poor or out- 
cast. 

" Where are all your beggars?" said Tom Brown; " don't they 
come to see }^our races ? " 

" There are no beggars here." 

We two left the crowd to the left, and went down to see the boats. 
They lay in a couple of unostentatious plank-houses, on the brink of 
the lake, and were rakish shells, each resembling a very long, and 
pointed cigar, scooped out in the middle, and guided by a rudder not 
bigger than a sheet of foolscap. 

Tom Brown said they were neither quite so long, nor quite so nar- 
row, as the highest university barges. Their crews were dressing as 
he approached, in handkerchiefs, silk shirts, and cotton drawers. 
They looked like work, and he bet his money on Yale. 

The scene along the lake borders was neither so eccentric, nor so 
densely peopled, as upon the Cherwell, or the Cam, during the British 
university races, but the knobs and capes of the lake were plenti- 
fully inhabited, and all the woodsides bordering it revealed groups 
of spectators, while the surface of the water was spotted with swift- 
darting craft, from the skeleton boat, manned by the single, conceited 
oarsman, in red shirt, to the punt giving lodgment to a family. 
The brass band, on the boldest cape, played fitful airs, chiefly milita- 
ry, but spending most of their time in picking out the tubes of their 
cornets with pen-knives, and little attention was paid to the Worces- 
ter regatta, for nobody in the country has much interest in what 
Worcester is doing ; but by and by the college boats came on the 
ground. 

Then the excitement rose to fever heat, though Tom Brown 
remarked that the disorder was not so coarse as in England, where 
ladies and grandfathers wagered, and " demmes " were as frequent 
as compliments. 

They gave the stakes to the keeping of one of the many Generals 
floating about, and scarcely had the agreement been made, when the 
signal gun reverberated, and the two college crews came dashing up 
the lake. 

Tom Brown watched the scene with his old interest. The scream 



NATIONAL AKT AND EDUCATION. 261 

of the partisans, the waving of ladies' cambrics, the flutter, and thun- 
der, and alarm were lost on his ears. He only saw the two long, 
lean, rakish shells dart forward, the oarsmen bending, till from waist 
to scalp their bodies lay horizontally ; and then the quick, vehement 
erection, which made the tough oars quiver, and gave the craft 
an impetus, like the ricochet of a shell, while every oar-lock vi- 
brated. 

Head and head they come, the swifter, but more fitful sweep of 
Harvard giving them for a time the advantage ; but the dip of Yale 
is like the method of the piston, — certain, equal, and irresistible, 
and as they pass, so bending to their task, that they only feel the 
proximity of the world, and divine the direction, and hearing, as folks 
in a vacuum, the peal of the cheers on shore, the twelve rowers put 
their souls in the shaft, and feel their hearts beat at the top of the 
paddles, and only know that the air is cloven, as by two lean and 
famished birds, and count, from time to time, the call of " steady," 
from the tremulous coxswain. 

Still, the cries of the cape, left far. behind, reach up to them, but 
they have only intuitions, no sense, nor perception, nor cognition. 
Away and away, each can hear the breathing of the other ; the buoy 
boat approaches ; the woods draw nearer ; the winds are so still, that 
the hard-drawn breath of every toiler is plainly noted while they 
ride. Fiercely pulls Harvard, with the reputation of its old pulls 
dependent upon it. 

Regularly and strongly labors Yale, too well indoctrinated, to do 
other than feather every oar, and make every stroke a reputation of 
its predecessor. 

And so, passing the stake boat, Tom Brown saw every impetus 
give Yale her golden hope, till, with wild gratulation, she returned 
past the cape, and shot across the starting-rope, like a flashing 
pendulum. 

Directly, the victors returned, the flags they fought for borne 
before them, and beaten Harvard went soberly home, hopeful of a 
better year. 

That night the boys made the town of Worcester ring. They 
burst the door-panels, and shied their pillows into the street. 

Leaving the universities we come to the public libraries, of which 
the largest in America is the Congressional Library in the Capitol at 
Washington. It now contains, in round numbers, about one hundred 
and eighty thousand volumes, which is more than that of Harvard 



262 



THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 



College, which outnumbers all others in the Union, except this, 
let us compare it with some European libraries : — 



But 



The Imperial Library, in Paris, 

" Royal Library, in Munich, . . . 

" Library of the British Museum, in London, 

" Bodleian, in Oxford, . . . • . 

" University Library, in Cambridge, 

" Arsenal Library, in Paris, . 

" Royal Library, in Berlin, .... 

" Imperial Library, in Vienna, . . 

" Royal Library, in Dresden . 

" University Library, in Gottingen, 

" Grand Ducal Library, in Darmstadt, . 

" Royal and University Library, in Breslau, . 

" Town Library, in Brussels, 

" Vatican, in Rome, ... 

" Imperial Library, in St. Petersburg; . 

" Royal Library, in Copenhagen, . 



volumes. 

1,081,000 
818,600 
615,000 
282,000 
200,163 
208,000 
510,000 
370,000 
302,800 
305,000 
304,000 
352,000 
210,000 
324,000 
475,000 
428,000 



Some notice of the British Museum has already been made, in the 
chapter on London ; we could have no such library and museum in 
America, even if we collected in one spot all the pictures, libraries, 
and scientific collections in the republic. The National Gallery, and 
the Kensington Museum contain the great art collections of London ; 
they are spacious edifices, and our collected art treasures would prob- 
ably make a sorry show in them. A small, but promising Art Gal- 
lery has recently been endowed, in Washington City, by W. W. Cor- 
coran, a banker. An Academy of Design was erected in New York, 
a few years ago ; but its annual exhibitions attract no such attention 
as those of the Royal Academy, in London. American artists have 
attracted attention abroad chiefly for their landscapes, and some of 
our sculptors, as Story, Powers, and Miss Hosmer, are well known 
in England, but we have neither the institutions nor the patrons to 
encourage art in America ; some of our best artists, as Boughton 
and Vedder, live abroad, and rely upon foreign support. 

American medical education was confined to Philadelphia for many 
years, where there are two renowned colleges, the Jefferson and the 
medical department of the University ; but medical students gen- 
erally resort to the greatest cities, where they have a versatile prac- 
tice in the hospitals, and New York seems to have had the favor of 
medical students since the civil war. 



NATIONAL ART AND EDUCATION. 263 

St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London contains five hundred and 
eighty beds, and it relieves seventy thousand patients a year, and has 
an annual income of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Guy's 
Hospital is endowed with more than one million dollars. Medical stu- 
dents pay two hundred dollars a } T ear for lectures, practice, and all 
privileges. St. Thomas Hospital has an income of one hundred and 
fifty thousand dollars a year ; it receives fifty thousand patients an- 
nually, and its splendid new hospital, which stands immediately op- 
posite the Parliament Houses, was built out of a part of about one 
million and a half of dollars which it received from a railroad com- 
pany for its former building at London Bridge. 

' We have several law schools in America, and young men generally 
read law in the offices of attorneys with us, while in England they 
live together in great buildings. 

The Inns of Court. There are four great Inns of Court in London : 
Inner Temple, Middle Temple, Lincoln's Inn, and Gray's Inn ; these 
Inns are voluntary households of law students and lawyers. The an- 
nual yearly rental of the offices in the Inns of London is more than 
five hundred thousand dollars. 

Monumental art in America is ambitious, but not of a remarkably 
national character. In London there is a statue of George Peabody, 
by an American — Story ; but this is almost the only case of Ameri- 
can sculpture getting government patronage abroad. 

I sometime ago spent part of a day in the shaft and workshops of 
the Washington Monument, — a mournful instance of the short- 
livedness of public impulse, and the defects in the machinery of mis- 
cellaneous private enterprise. This monument is already raised to 
the height of one hundred and seventy-five feet. It has cost nearly 
two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and is raised to more than 
one-third its total height. The foundations are perfectly secure, and 
capable of supporting all the height yet to be added. There are 
stones from all parts of the w T orld, ready to be inserted in the 
shaft, or subsidiary temple ; but work has been suspended upon it for 
about twelve years. 

The monument was discouraged, because the people believed that 
the contributions being dropped into post-office boxes, all over the 
country, were stolen and never applied to the edifice, and also because 
the artists and art critics kept up a steady fire of deprecation upon 
the plan of the monument. This plan was an obelisk, surrounded 
with a Greek temple. There is no notion at present of adding the 



264 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

temple, but the monument association hope to raise money enough 
to finish the obelisk. It is easy to do this, and it ought to be done, 
for the unfinished shaft in the capital city is a record of popular im- 
potence worse than if a monument to Washington had never been 
begun. This age and people are no exception to the human passion 
for monumentalization. If ten thousand churches and schools would 
give twent} r -five dollars apiece, this monument could be finished. 
The interior of the shaft is of twenty-five feet diameter, between 
the inner sides of the walls, and so thick are the walls that the ex- 
terior diameter is fifty-five feet. The material is marble, from Mary- 
land. Within, there is a yawning chasm of shaft, very impressive to 
look up into, and see at the farthest height a scaffold hung, from which 
a rope droops dizzily, and on the floor the dampness splashes, and the 
darkness lies all round the year, save when some melancholy visitor 
puts his head within, and feels dejected over the suspended gratitude 
of the land of Washington. I hope no more great monuments will 
be commenced, but hope a feeling will be revived to see this one fin- 
ished. The memorial stones to decorate some portions of the shaft 
represent all companies, lands, and ages, — lava from Vesuvius, 
aerolites shaken out of crazy satellites or planets, rocks of copper 
and of porphyry stones from Jerusalem and Mecca, — everything but 
the Pope's stone, which not the builders, but the mob rejected. 

The finest monument in America is probably the Washington 
monument at Richmond, Virginia, unfinished. In the great city of 
New York we have but one fine public statue, while the United King- 
dom is a great museum of colossal ornamental works. The Albert 
Memorial, the finest monument erected in our generation, stands in 
Hyde Park, London, and it cost six hundred thousand dollars. It is 
a splendid Gothic canopy and spire-, and it is one hundred and sixty 
feet high, and covers, with its flights of steps, a square of one hun- 
dred and thirty feet each way ; colossal groups of statuary surround 
it ; the Prince Consort is enshrined above. Close by this magnificent 
monument stands the marble arch, which cost four hundred and fifty 
thousand dollars. 



CHAPTER X, 

LOCAL GOVERNMENT IN THE STATES, COUNTIES, AND PROVINCES. 

Sketches of some American states and some English counties, with their comparative 
populations, rights, and resources. 

The names of American States perpetuate the Indian names of 
their great rivers and lakes, or bear the names of their colonial pro- 
prietors. The English Counties retain their old Saxon names, some 
of them as Kent, Sussex, and Surrey having been Saxon kingdoms. 
In America a State has jurisdiction over all the incorporated cities 
within its boundaries, but in England many of the large towns rank 
as " Counties Corporate," and the officials of the surrounding County 
cannot control them. We have in this country different laws in the 
different States, and even different codes of law. In Louisiana, 
justice was administered by the code Napoleon instead of the English 
common law. So in England there are old distinctions of privilege 
and administration between the great Counties, but these are of little 
consequence to our inquiry, and need not be recited. The English 
County, like the American State, is mainly a judicial district, but it 
has less independence. A State with us exercises large powers of 
sovereignty, charters railway and traffic companies, and between its 
pretensions and the progress of the Federal government has arisen 
our most deadly collision. As in America, the administrative dis- 
tricts of England are these Counties, corresponding to our States ; 
the County Governor is called the Lord Lieutenant ; the Sheriff and 
his deputies constitute the main constabulary force ; the other officers 
of Count} - governments are Justices of the Peace, Coroners, and Knights 
of the Shire. The police system, however, throughout all England is 
controlled by the Home Secretary, a member of the Cabinet. There 
is no voting by ballot, in any of these Counties ; those only count as 
electors who can vote for Parliament members ; few of the County 
offices are elective, but are held at the disposal of the King's minis- 
ters. With us a State is a turbulent and organized territory, having 
all its own machinery driven by its own will. An English County is 
34 265 " 



266 THE NEW WORLD COMPAEED WITH THE OLD. 

an ancient territory which sends a part of the members to Parlia- 
ment. The Lord Lieutenants hold their offices for life ; and, unlike 
our State Governors, neither receive salaries nor are strictly account- 
able for their party politics. When a vacancy occurs in a Lord 
Lieutenancy, by death or resignation, it is filled by the Cabinet, which 
is a political bod}^ ; but only four cases are on record of the removal 
of these officers for opposing a dominant national administration. 
When a Lord Lieutenant is appointed, he appears before the Queen's 
Council and takes the oath ; a Lord Lieutenant, however, has military 
authority mainly, while the Sheriff of each County is the principal 
judicial officer ; both Lord Lieutenants and Sheriffs are considered to 
belong to the Lord Chancellor's department, the latter officer being 
the great conservator of the peace. An English Sheriff is in almost 
all respects like the Sheriff of an American County ; he executes all 
processes of the King's Courts, serves writs, arrests, takes bail, has 
charge of jails, and is responsible for the execution of criminals ; like 
the Lord Lieutenants, Sheriffs are appointed by the Queen's adminis- 
tration on nomination by the County Judges ; several persons are 
generally nominated, and the Queen designates who shall serve by 
pricking the parchment list with a punch opposite his name. The 
Sheriff gets no salary ; he serves one year, and is, during that time, 
the most eminent subject in the County ; except for this social con- 
sideration, few persons would care to serve as Sheriffs. Several ladies 
have filled this office in past times. 

In the County in which London is situated the citizens have the 
chartered right to appoint their Sheriffs, and, in the County of Corn- 
wall, the Prince of Wales names the Sheriff, for he is the Duke of 
Cornwall. Lancaster, in England, used to be the property of a 
nobleman, who became King, and it is governed, in part, by a sepa- 
rate Cabinet officer, as the private appendage of the sovereign. 

The English Count} T , like the American State, is a district of his- 
toric, and not of legislative construction ; the Counties, therefore, are 
very unequal in size. From time immemorial, England has had forty 
Counties, and Wales, twelve. The largest of all the English Counties 
is Yorkshire, which has about the area of Connecticut and Rhode 
Island together, and is for convenience divided into four districts, 
three of which are called Ridings, — a corruption of the word 
" Tithings," which latter means a district composed of three Hun- 
dreds. In the State of Delaware, in the United States, Counties are 
also divided into Hundreds. None of these small divisions, in Eng- 



LOCAL GOVERNMENT IN THE STATES, ETC. 267 

land, have the right to create railway monopolies like some of our 
States, or to embarrass traffic passing across them. The general 
Parliament is their Parliament in all matters affecting great interests. 
Each English County is bound to maintain a Jail and House of Cor- 
rection ; both Counties and towns can be compelled to erect Lunatic 
Asylums ; these institutions are visited periodically, by the Justices 
of the Peace ; they are maintained by rates levied on the County or 
town, and over the whole series of them, Parliament, or the Cabinet 
exercises the rights of inspection and interference. Within the past 
ten 3'ears the condition of English prisons has greatly improved ; all 
the greater penitentiaries and the convict stations are out of control 
of the Counties, and belong to the government. 

In no part of England is flogging now permitted, and steps have 
been taken to abolish it in the Army and the Navy ; but on the con- 
vict stations flogging is in full vogue, though the sentiment of the na- 
tion is expressed against it even there. We retain the whipping-post 
in but one State, Delaware. In each of the three court-house villa- 
ges of Delaware the whipping-post is an old and familiar ornament. 
It w T as removed from Wilmington, the principal city, many years ago, 
but you can see it in Georgetown and Newcastle, and in Dover, the 
State capital. The legislators, if in session, at the time of court, 
can hear the screams of the whipped in the green jail-} T ard, behind 
the State House, and if they like, look out of the Representatives' 
Hall, upon the flogging. This whipping-post looks like an old pump 
without a handle or a spout, the fissure in which the handle, if 
supplied, would work, being devoted to the pillory board, which is 
passed through and pegged fast. In this board the offender's head 
and wrists are locked tight, and he stands in the hot sun, or rain, as 
it may be, exposed to the taunts of tavern loafers, — his friends, 
probably, yesterday or to-morrow. To the sides of the whipping- 
post, three feet above the ground, a pair of iron clamps are fastened ; 
these pass over the wrists of the condemned, and are locked to staples 
below, so that he stands with his back bowed, hugging the post. 
Behind him stands the Sheriff, or his deputy, applying the raw-hide. 
The boys, the negroes, sometimes the girls, come round to be amused, 
for in a dull town like Dover, a whipping is a fall of manna in the 
wilderness. The consequences of the punishment do not stop with 
the bloody bare back of the criminal ; they extend to the } T oung spec- 
tators, and make them coarse and insensible ; they give the State a 
name, which its neighbors abhor, and involve our common nationality 



268 THE NEW WOKLD COMPABED WITH THE OLD. 

in the shame of their stripes. They brutalize the State of Delaware ; 
its women and its men together sharing the effects of the infliction, 
which is morally worse than to be whipped. White men are said to 
be seldom beaten here. 

At the town of New Castle, some cunning imitator of the virtues 
of the guillotine has invented a cat-o'-nine-tails, with wire extremi- 
ties, every blow of which cuts into the tendons like a knife-blade, 
and often into the loins. More than twelve (one hundred and eight) 
blows of this instrument are said to be perilous to life. 

The pillory is no less brutalizing, being a blow at one's pride, 
which is the last article of man that a good State can appeal to, and 
to the spectators it makes a ribaldry of punishment, so that they 
laugh at the pilloried one, and do not pity him. 

The people of Delaware, from the Governor down, argue for the 
continuance of these two Asiatic institutions, saying, chiefly, that 
the whipping-post is a better preventative than the jail, and that only 
negroes " catch it." 

The most populous County in England is Lancaster, which in 1861 
had two and a half millions of people, or was about equal to the pop- 
ulation of Ohio in 1860. The second County, in populousness, was 
Middlesex, in which the bulk of London lies, with two and one-fifth 
millions, or a million and a half less people than New York State, 
in which the American London lies. The third County, in, rank, is 
York, with a little above two millions, somewhat greater than Illi- 
nois. The fourth County is Surrey, also embracing a part of Lon- 
don, which contains one hundred and fifty thousand less people than 
Alabama. Stafford and Kent follow next, being about as populous 
as Wisconsin and South Carolina. Wales, altogether, contains about 
one million one hundred thousand people, or about as many as 
Tennessee. The smallest English County is Rutland, which has one- 
sixth the population of Delaware. Warwick has a third as many 
people as Rhode Island. England and Wales are more densely pop- 
ulated than any other country in Europe, except Belgium, containing 
about three million seven hundred and fort}' thousand houses, and 
upwards of twenty millions of people, or nearly three hundred and 
fifty to the square mile. In many English Counties the population is 
decreasing. England has doubled in population in the course of half 
a century ; the women outnumber the men, in England, five per 
cent. 

Passing from State to State, in America, the traveller sees few 



LOCAL GOVERNMENT IN THE STATES, ETC. 269 

striking differences in the garbs, the habitations, or the farms of the 
people ; but in England there are customs and traditions inherent in 
each County, which the laboring people preserve from year to year. 
These are of infinite amusement to the American, and in the small 
space of England proper there is more variety of life and condition 
than in all America. Almost every parish has its common, where 
pasture the cows, asses, and goats of the poor. Every parish has 
one church, and of these, alone, there are twelve thousand in Eng- 
land ; they are frequently of great antiquity, dating back to the 
earliest days of Christianity in Britain, and their picturesque towers, 
and roofs of thatch, or tile, or slate, are studies for wayfarer and 
architect alike. In every parish there is a work-house, and many of 
the poor are also paid weekly stipends, who do not inhabit this 
asylum. " To come upon the parish," is the English phrase for rely- 
ing upon charity. Not only are there commons in the villages, but 
along the roadsides in many parts of England there are barren tracts, 
which yet give root to bushes of furze, whose beautiful yellow flowers 
make their lonesomeness bloom. Gypsies and cricketers betake 
themselves to these commons and wastes, for England has been a 
favorite kingdom for the former named these many centuries. 
Throughout the whole of these Parish and County jurisdictions, the 
power of the landholder shows itself, interwoven with all the condi- 
tions of life, and responsible for the most of them. 

The large manufacturing cities of England lie, in many cases, upon 
the manors of these aristocrats, and when the manor of Manchester 
was subsequently purchased by the Corporation, in 1845, the purchase 
money amounted to no less than one million of dollars. The power 
of the English magistrate is dependent upon his wealth and rank 
more thoroughly than upon his office, and, in fact, like the Swiss land- 
lords, who are also magistrates, and pass upon the justice of their 
own accounts, the English magistrates are mainly taken up with the 
conservation of their own laws, lands, and privileges. They control 
the church u living," in many cases, and it is to their interest to en- 
force the church-rates, which pay the salary of their parson, — per- 
haps a relative. They keep game, and much of their administration 
is the punishing of " poachers " upon it. By the theory of English 
law, the sovereign is the only person who has the right to pursue 
game, and whoever wishes to acquire such right must obtain a license 
from the crown. This right has been transmitted to the landed gen- 
try, and Blackstone says that " the only difference between the old 



270 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

Norman forest laws, and the new game laws, is that formerly there 
was only one great hunter through the land, whereas, at present, a 
petty Nimrod reigns in every manor-house. To be able to shoot a 
partridge upon land which he leased, required, down to 1830, fifty 
times as much income as to be a parliamentary elector. At present a 
man may shoot game on his own land, by buying a license, or he may 
lease a field for shooting to a licensed gunner. In this way the great 
landed proprietors frequently receive large sums of money every year, 
by selling out a week's or a month's shooting on their grounds. 
Dealing in game is allowed by license and trade certificate, but 
poaching by night and killing game out of season are punished 
severely. The game laws have made almost as many criminals in 
England as the use of alcohol. The prevalence of game in America 
has made our laws lax in respect to it, and in the eastern part of the 
United States there is probably less game at present than in Great 
Britain, where it is preserved. We have no such oppressive land 
monopolies as the English, and need fear the inauguration of no such 
game laws as have been maintained with them ; but a land without 
birds is almost as poor as a land without trees. We are taking steps 
in many of the States to guard the fish and the game, and not to rob 
posterity altogether. 

In America we find that very small States retard the interests of 
their greater neighbors. Delaware maintains the whipping-post, be- 
cause she has not the population to support large penitentiaries and 
State institutions. But in England there is among the governing 
classes a strong preference for little jurisdictions and small constitu- 
encies. 

One of the most noteworthy points of a late address of Mr. 
Gladstone was that portion of it in which he spoke most strongly in 
behalf of small nomination boroughs. He said he regarded them as 
supplying the race of men who were trained to carry on the govern- 
ment of the country, the masters of civil wisdom, like Mr. Burke, 
Sir James Mackintosh, Mr. Pelham, Lord Chatham, Mr. Fox, Mr. 
Pitt, Mr. Canning, and Sir Robert Peel, all of whom sat first for small 
boroughs. If there was to be no ingress to the House but one, and 
that one the suffrages of a large mass of voters, there would be a 
dead level of mediocrity. The extension, the durability, of our lib- 
erty were to be attributed, under Providence, to distinguished states- 
men introduced into the House at an early age. But large constitu- 



LOCAL GOVERNMENT IN THE STATES, ETC. 271 

encies would not return boys, and therefore he hoped the small bor- 
oughs would be retained. 

Two of the most alarming evils of our American system of gov- 
ernment are, the corruption of the State Legislatures, and the appli- 
cation of universal suffrage to the selection of Judges and the dispo- 
sition of municipal finances. In the great cities, particularly in the 
greatest of our cities, the taxes are imposed by partisans chosen from 
the destitute and debauched classes, and it seems impossible, accord- 
ing to present indications, that New York city will ever get, by the 
present system, a purer form of government. 

Justices of the Peace, in England, are selected from the richest 
and most respectable people. Rich merchants, clergymen, great 
landed proprietors, and leading lawyers are invested with this office ; 
they are generally appointed for the whole County, by the Lord Chan- 
cellor, on formal application from the candidate himself. There are 
about eighteen thousand Justices in England, only thirteen hundred 
of whom are paid, and yet nearly one-half are arduously engaged in 
dealing out justice So honorable is the possession of even a petty 
office esteemed in England ! These Justices of the Peace are the minor 
magistrates of the kingdom, and commit all paupers, ke.ep the high- 
ways free, demand bail, and have jurisdiction over the small offences 
of everybody but peers. These Justices need not give open hear- 
ings ; they have no control over cases affecting bequeathed property, 
but can compel the payment of tithes and wages, and they arbitrate 
between master and workman. Like all other subjects these Justices 
of the Peace are answerable to the law ; but their motives are con- 
sidered in extenuation of their acts. The combined Justices of the 
Peace in one Count} T appoint the Constables thereof, but great variety 
in the manner of appointing and controlling the police exists amongst 
the different Counties. 

London, excepting the city proper, is divided into twenty-three 
district courts, whose magistrates are paid salaries, and unlike our 
American police justices they must be barristers-at-law of seven 
years' standing. 

Within the Counties, Coroners, Knights of the Shire, Poor-law 
" Unions," and Boards of Health are elected by the freeholders of the 
County. In the large towns the "gentry" are no longer the Justices 
of the Peace, magistrates being appointed for that purpose. About 
the office of Justice of the Peace, Lord Coke says, " that if it is ad- 
ministered in a fitting manner the whole of Christendom has not its 



272 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

equal." It is a pity that this sentiment does not control the appoint- 
ment of petty magistrates in the United States. A propert}^ qualifi- 
cation is required for this office throughout England, except in the 
case of peers. 

Eighteen or twenty towns constituted municipal Counties, chief of 
which are London, York, Chester, Bristol, Nottingham, Exeter, and 
Newcastle. These Counties have their own sheriffs, coroners, and 
militia. But now upwards of two hundred towns in England are 
not subject to the government of the Counties in which they are situ- 
ated. The tax-payers elect a Mayor, who serves for one year, and 
can be a magistrate for a year succeeding. The town government 
consists of a Board of Aldermen and a Council. The Mayor presides 
over the Council. Aldermen serve for six years. Common Council 
meets once a quarter. Except in some minor details, where some 
must}^ old privilege or nuisance is tolerated or compromised, English 
municipalities at the present day are nearly counterparts of our Amer- 
ican city governments ; but, in our American cities, we attach too 
little importance to the municipal legislatures, and in the English 
cities they attach too much. We consign the vast property interests 
of beautiful cities, like New York, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati, to 
bodies of councilmen who often have no interests in the town, and no 
acquaintance with decent society. .. 

The least consequential cities of England are guarded in all their 
municipal interests with that jealous respect for property rights which 
is characteristic of the entire English government. 

A representative American State may be cited to show how our 
separate sovereignties are governed. 

As an example, take the State of New York. It has had six dis- 
tinct forms of government, — Dutch, English, Revolutionary, — be- 
sides three Constitutions, and another Constitution proposed (1867). 
In a few paragraphs I will, consider these various forms of govern- 
ment, in order to show the democratic growth of State government. 

The Dutch established civil government in 1621, — nearly two hun- 
dred and fifty years ago, — on the basis of the Dutch Roman Law, 
with a Director-General and Council, and embarrassed right of appeal 
to the home government of Holland. New York (Amsterdam) city 
was incorporated in 1653. 

The English captured the colony in 1664, and governed as arbitra- 
rily as the Dutch for twenty-seven years. The Captain-General, who 
was much the same officer as the Captain-General of Cuba in 1869, 



LOCAL GOVERNMENT IN THE STATES, ETC. 273 

held his office during the pleasure of the English government, and 
received twelve thousand dollars a year, exclusive of fees. His coun- 
cil consisted of about a dozen members, and every councillor was 
called " The Honorable." 

During the Revolution, the British set at rest most experiments 
upon the temporary form of government by capturing the city and 
establishing martial law in it. What New York State has grown to 
be in our day is a more interesting consideration. 

The New York Civil Service List is a book of six hundred pages, 
very carefully edited, and a model for the United States Blue Book, 
which is much less satisfactory. 

It is at once a history of the State, and a personal record of all its 
officials, from the year 1621 to the present time. As I look over this 
book I am reminded of how far enterprise, State pride, and talent go 
to diminish the political and social sins of New York State. 

A stranger, unacquainted with the inside affairs of the worst-gov- 
erned city in the New World, looks in vain for the outward evidences 
of decadence. He sees the lamps duly lighted every night far into 
the naked country, until the whole island blazes. A policeman is 
never out of sight. Gangs of workmen go steadily up the streets, 
laying huge cubical blocks of paving-stone. One never feels able to 
believe his body endangered here, provided he shall not go into dens 
of danger. The magnificent Court House rises slowly to completion. 
The Central Park grows more elaborate ; the town strides past it ; 
the cit} r gets a surer, grander hold upon the island every year, en- 
croaching on the purlieus, fixing the sockets of its East River bridge 
to cross an arm of the salt sea, and casting its determined eye upon 
Hell Gate, resolving that some day the " Great Eastern" ship shall 
tread up Long Island Sound, as up the long nave of some cathedral, 
to anchor fast at the piers of the city. Like Paris, New York is a 
better protector of the stranger than of her own citizens. To the one 
she turns her monuments ; to the other, her tax-gatherers. 

In like manner with the State. At Albany they are la}dng the 
piers of the great State Capitol, to rival the Hotel de vifye of Paris in 
its mediaeval elaborateness. 

The Civil Service List which I take up shows that the State of 
New York probably exercises more powers of sovereignty than any 
State in America, Massachusetts scarcely excepted. The Governor 
appoints foreign commissioners, wreck-masters, and other dignitaries. 

The Governor's staff have actual duties and material to consider, 
35 



274: THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

and are not, as in many States, altogether ornamental appendages. 
They are Brigadier-Generals, and are salaried, as well as their aides. 
The State has a Bureau of Military Statistics, with a museum of tro- 
phies and mementoes. The Secretary of State is a powerful officer, 
with diversified duties. The canals of the State are its property, and 
the chief sources of its revenue and corruption. 

Bank and Insurance Companies are put under rigid censorship. 
There are three immense State prisons, in the three corners of the 
triangle, the newest of which is at Clinton, near Lake Champlain^ 
among the Adirondacks. The Superintendent of Schools has more 
multifarious duties, if he performs them well, than the similar officer 
of many kingdoms. 

The Regents of the University are general custodians of the higher 
academies and State colleges, who receive no salaries. There is also 
a Board of Railroad Commissioners. The State holds and restricts 
the city of New York, very much as an army holds a hostile town in 
time of war, being as jealous of the city as is the English government 
of London. 

The salary of the Governor of New York is 4,000 dollars ; and 
on "the last popular vote for this office eight hundred and fifty 
thousand ballots were cast. He has a private Secretary and private 
Door-keeper. The Lieutenant Governor gets six dollars a day ; four 
of the Governor's staff get 2,400 dollars each a year, and their aides 
get 1,800 dollars; the Secretary of State gets 2,500 dollars; the 
Comptroller and Treasurer, 2,500 dollars each; the State Engineer, 
2,500 dollars ; the Auditor of the Canal 2,500 dollars ; the Attorney-Gen- 
eral, 2,000 dollars ; Canal Commissioners, 2,000 dollars each ; several 
Canal Appraisers, 2,000 dollars and expenses ; the Superintendent of 
Insurance companies, 5,000 dollars ; and of banks, 5,000 dollars ; three 
Prison Inspectors, 1,600 dollars; Superintendent of Schools, 2,500 
dollars; Inspector of Gas-metres, 1,500 dollars; Judges generally 
3,500 dollars ; Members of the Legislature three dollars per day, and the 
Speaker four dollars. 

These saldf ies are inadequate, in the main, to keep honest poor men 
in office, and it is notorious that, in the general demoralization of a 
commercial age, New York has one of the most corrupt Legislatures in 
America. 

There are in New York nineteen incorporated cities, of which 
Ogdensburgh is probably the smallest. The terms city, town, and 
village have more definite and traditional meanings in this State than 



LOCAL GOVERNMENT IN THE STATES, ETC. 275 

we generally allow in our loose commonwealths. Above all other 
political powers in the State are these two, — The State Capitol and 
Tammany Hall. 

In 1860 New York State contained three million eight hundred and 
eighty thousand seven hundred and thirt} r -five inhabitants, and next 
year will probably show four million five hundred thousand, allowing 
the same increase as in the previous decade. This is one-fourth more 
people than Scotland, and, as New York is about one-fourth greater 
than Scotland, their relative density is nearly the same. It is about 
a million less than the diminishing population of Ireland, and, the 
changes being the same, in another ten years New York will be more 
populous than Ireland. It is nearly one-third the population of 
Spain. It is half a million past that of Portugal. It is almost ex- 
actly that of Belgium, and a third greater than Holland, the parent 
country of New York. It is a million past that of Sweden. It is a 
fourth the population of Prussia. It is double that of Switzerland, 
and, if we estimate the present population of London at three millions, 
it is London and a half, and it is one-half more people than com- 
posed the United States in the war of the Revolution, and four and 
a half times all the people on the Pacific coast of the United States 
at the present day. 

The property of the State Government of New York is about 
eighty millions of dollars. It owns about three thousand miles of 
railroad, or nearly as much as Prussia. 

With powers of such magnitude, far exceeding those of the most 
powerful County in England, it is refreshing to mark the ignorance of 
some British commentators upon our States, one of whom, Mr. An- 
thony Trollope, says : — 

" Nothing has struck me so much in America as the fact that the 
State Legislatures are puny powers. The absence of any tidings 
whatever of their doings across the water is a proof of this. Who 
has heard of the Legislature of New York or of Massachusetts ? It 
is boasted here that their insignificance is a sign of the well-being of 
the people ; that the smallness of the power necessary for carrying 
on the machine shows how beautifully the machine is organized, and 
how well it works. 4 It is better to have little government than great 
Governors.' That glory, if ever it were a glory, has come to an end. 
It seems to me that all these troubles have come upon the States, 
because they have not placed high men in high places. The less of 
laws and the less of control the better, providing the people can go 



276 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

right with few laws and little control. One may say that no laws 
and no control would be best of all, — provided that none were 
needed. But this is not exactly the position of the American peo- 
ple." 

The same writer is more to the point when he says that " the two 
professions of law-making and of governing have become unfashion- 
able, low in estimation, and of no repute in the States. The munici- 
pal powers of the cities have not fallen into the hands of the leading 
men. The word politician has come to bear the meaning of political 
adventurer, and almost of political blackleg. If A calls B a politician, 
A intends to vilify B by so calling him. Whether or no the best 
citizens of a State will ever be induced to serve in the State Legisla- 
ture by a nobler consideration than that of pay, or by a higher tone 
of political morals than that now existing, I cannot say. It seems 
to me that some great decrease in the numbers of the State legislators 
should be a first step toward such a consummation. There are not 
many men in each State who can afford to give two or three months 
of the year to the State service for nothing ; but it may be presumed 
that in each State there are a few. Those who are induced to devote 
their time by the payment of sixty pounds can hardly be the men 
most fitted for the purpose of legislation. 

" It certainly has seemed to me that the members of the State Legis- 
latures and of the State governments are not held in that respect, and 
treated with that confidence, to which, in the eyes of an Englishman, 
such functionaries should be held as entitled. " 

The Channel Islands, which lie in the British seas, are regulated 
internally by their old Norman laws. The writs of the great courts 
of Westminster are not served here, but the Queen's commission 
must be produced. Parliament must mention the islands by name, if 
they are to be governed by any of its acts. For a good account of 
Guernsey, one of these islands, read Victor Hugo's story of " The 
Toilers of the Sea." 

The Isle of Man, in the Irish Sea, is governed by its own Legisla- 
ture, composed of two bodies, the "Council," and the " House of 
Keys," and by a Queen's governor. An inhabitant of Man is called 
a Manx-man. 

Scotland retains many individual customs. The government 
grants about one-third of the benefices of its established church. 
Common law and equity are not under two heads as in England, and 
every act of Parliament applies to Scotland, unless the terms of the 



LOCAL GOVERNMENT IN THE STATES, ETC. 277 

law make the exception. There is no grand jury in Scotland, nor 
must the petit jury unanimously agree. The Supreme Court in civil 
cases is the Court of Session, consisting of thirteen judges, with 
"inner" and "outer" houses, and the Court of Justiciary is the 
supreme tribunal in criminal cases, composed of five select judges of 
the Court of Sessions. The head President of the Court of Sessions 
gets 27,000 dollars a year; he is the head of the select bench. The 
Lord Justice Clerk gets 22,500 dollars, and is at the head of the 
minor bench. The other judges get 15,000 dollars a year. The law 
officers are the Lord Advocate, with salary and fees of 15,000 dollars 
a } r ear, and the Solicitor General, with 5,000 dollars a year. The 
revenue of the English Established Church in Ireland, up to the time 
of its legislated decease in 1869, was nearly three millions of dollars 
in gold a year. 

The Scotch people gave a dynasty — and the worst one — to the 
English throne, and being a shrewd and business-like people, they 
have greatly prospered by the union between the two ancient king- 
doms. They retain their national church, and have no foreign Lord 
Lieutenant to preside over them ; on the contrary, the English royal 
family has a residence in Scotland. 

Very different in intention and reception is the government of Ire- 
land. Practically, the government of Ireland and every step of im- 
portance connected with it, are under the immediate control of the 
English Cabinet. On matters of revenue, the Lord Lieutenant of 
Ireland is instructed to correspond with the Treasury ; but on all other 
subjects with the Home Secretary of State, who is deemed personally 
responsible for the government of Ireland, and is in close correspond- 
ence with the Lord Lieutenant, advising him, and keeping him in- 
formed of the views and opinions of the Cabinet upon all the more 
important questions connected with his government. For the issue 
of instruments under the Great Seal of Ireland, he receives Her 
Majesty's authority by warrants under her sign manual. No person 
professing the Roman Catholic religion can hold the office. The 
Lord Lieutenant's duration of office depends upon that of the minis- 
try of which he is a member. His salary has generally been one 
hundred thousand dollars per annum, with a residence in Dublin 
Castle, and another in Phoenix Park. 

All acts of Parliament extend to Ireland, unless they be expressly 
excepted. There is a special Privy Council for Ireland, consisting 
of fifty-eight members, each member of which is entitled " Right 



278 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

Honorable." There is a Secretary of State, removable like the Lord 
Lieutenant, on a change of administration, with a salary of fifteen 
thousand dollars a year, and a permanent under-Secretary with ten 
thousand dollars a year. 

The Lord Lieutenant of Ireland is thus one of the most important 
officers of the British government. He has the highest salary, — even 
above the Lord Chancellor and the Prime Minister ; he can pardon 
criminals in Ireland ; he has charge of the police, and is the superior 
of the army general in command of Ireland. He is, in short, a mili- 
tary governor, and keeps Ireland in subjection, prevents insurrection, 
and exercises the pretence of civil powers, but the reality of arbitrary 
ones. 

I feel the same disinclination to compare the behavior of Ireland 
and Scotland as parts of the British Kingdom that I should to com- 
pare Esau and Jacob, Ishmael and Isaac. Two warm temperaments, 
one burning to genius, the other to business, the Scotchman has 
become prosperous by submission, the Irishman wretched by resist- 
ance. Neither had a like religion with the nation that absorbed 
them. The Scotch Presbyterian is no less a foe to the English 
hierarchy than is the Irish Catholic ; but the Scotch were never the 
creatures of demagogues, the dust of faction, nor the forward partisans 
of their ecclesiastics. Democratic in church government, every 
Scotchman thought for himself in civil government ; every Scotchman 
saw that the geographical modern law forbade England and Scotland 
to be two governments, and he worked for his place in the compound 
government. 

Two destructive things have underlain Ireland : a priesthood con- 
trolled from abroad, and an unstable national character. The Irish- 
man has genius, wit, music, valor, — but not convictions. He follows 
leaders everywhere, and is betrayed by them or betrays them. It is 
impossible to believe that, under any circumstances, Ireland or Eng- 
land could have been happy or peaceful, divided. The Irishman 
would have been, abroad, the Northman pirate preying upon his 
neighbor ; at home the Orange and the Ribbon bands exterminating 
each other. To this irreconcilable enemy the arrogant Englishman 
must be either a master or a victim. Yet Irish individualism has 
been one of the glories of the English nation. Grattan, Wellington, 
Goldsmith, proclaim it. The Irish nation, like the Jewish race, seems 
fated to illustrate all lands, and control, as a unity, in none. They 
are to England what the American Indian is to us : the theme of 



LOCAL GOVERNMENT IN THE STATES, ETC. 279 

allegory and drama, the type of generosity and valor, but also the 
race of short truces and frequent forays. In peace they fall into 
tribes and plunder each other. In war they violate international 
law and the terms of hospitality, moving upon England by way of 
Black Rock in Canada. Dispersed among the other races, they are 
an element of vigor and industry ; but collected, as in the great Amer- 
ican cities, they make us write such verdicts against them as we do, 
with pity. No American can speak in praise of English rule in Ire- 
land. No American can speak in praise of Irish behavior under 
England. Two men have lived in Ireland who rank as benefactors : 
Father Mathew, the apostle of temperance, and Daniel O'Connell, 
wiio procured the enfranchisement of Irish Catholic subjects. O'Con- 
nell showed all the genius of his race, amongst whom he was a gen- 
tleman, and also all its turbulence. The latter years of his life were 
passed in nervous retirement, and after his discharge from jail in Ire- 
land for agitating for the repeal of the act of union between Ireland 
and England, these are the particulars of his life^ well told by an 
historian : — 

"Released from jail one evening, he went home to his own house. 
The next morning early, he w^ent back to his prison, to be carried 
home in triumph. The whole city of Dublin was abroad to see ; and 
it was two hours from the time when the procession began to leave 
the jail gates before the car could be brought up. The car — invented 
for the occasion, and never seen again but at his funeral — lifted 
him a dozen feet over the heads of the crowd. He stood at his full 
height, and was crowned with the repeal-cap. He was portly, and 
apparently in good health ; but his countenance wore that anxious 
expression which was now becoming habitual to it. 

" He was invited to England, and feted there, and made use of for 
the anti-corn law cause. But he was never really formidable again, 
and he knew it. He had no policy, no principle, nothing to repose 
upon ; and only his ingenuity and audacity for a resource. Then he 
was seen in London streets, walking slowly and stooping, while sup- 
ported by two of his sons ; and members of the House complained 
that they could not hear his now short speeches, because of the 
feebleness of his voice. He retired to Hastings, on the coast. He 
desired that the newspapers might be kept away from him, and all 
tidings of Ireland. No one was to be admitted who would speak of 
Ireland. He so watched the countenance of his physician when 
looking at his tongue, and was so alarmed by any gravity of coun- 



280 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

tenance at the moment, that his physician had to remember to look 
cheerful and pleased. 

" Next he went abroad, hoping to reach Rome, and die under the 
blessing of the Pope. But he sank too rapidly for this. He was 
carried to Paris, Marseilles, Genoa ; and then he could go no fur- 
ther. 

u The final symptoms, consequent on a long decay of the digestive 
functions, came on in May, 1847 ; and on the fifteenth of that month 
he died." 

This is, perhaps, a severe treatment of the character of O'Connell, 
who is now a feature of statuary in Dublin, but Harriet Martineau 
says thus further of him : — 

u Ireland has been abundantly cursed with barbarous despots, but 
it may be doubted whether any one of them, in the long course of 
centuries, has perpetrated such effectual cruelties as the despot whom 
his victims called their Liberator, and hoped to see their King." He 
was, in the opinion of this writer, the pervertor of the seriousness which 
covered the Irish nation after Father Mathew's discourses, into mis- 
chievous political intemperances. The latter days of O'Connell were 
clouded by the calumnies of the hot-headed "Young Ireland " party, 
of whom Miss Martineau says : " The latest phase of the lives, and 
opinions, and influences of the Young Ireland party, tells the moral 
very well : John Mitchell, a fanatical champion of the slave-power in 
America ; Meagher, in military command hi the service of the north ; 
O'Brien, issuing his manifesto from Ireland, in behalf of the Confed- 
erates and their despotism, and the Irish in New York, slaying ne- 
groes in the streets, and rising up against law and order, — these are 
apt illustrations of the spurious kind of Irish patriotism, which would 
destroy Ireland by aggravating its weakness, and rejecting the means 
of recovery and strength ! " 

I have referred thus particularly to O'Connell and Ireland, because 
he was the Irish Calhoun, advocating the withdrawal of Ireland from 
the English Parliament, while Smith O'Brien and John Mitchell were 
like the later State-Rights party in America, making their appeals to 
the sword. For a thorough idea of Irish politics, though a partisan 
one, read the story of the " Knight of Gwynne," by Charles Lever, 
which recites the condition of Ireland in 1800, when her Parliament 
was merged with that of England, through the efforts of an Irish 
statesman, Castlereagh. 

We live, at present, at a period of American history, when the 



LOCAL GOVERNMENT IN THE STATES, ETC. 281 

central government is all-powerful, but it must ever be remembered, 
— and this we shall see further when we come to France, — that lib- 
erty in a republic is best guarded, when by means of cities and states, 
power is distributed throughout the territory, instead of residing in a 
single spot. This is the comment of the wise and discreet De 
Tocqueville, the best foreign observer upon America : ■ — 

11 The Union is a great republic, in extent, but the paucity of 
objects for which its government provides, assimilates it to a small 
State. Its acts are important, but they are rare. As the sovereignty 
of the Union is limited, and incomplete, its exercise is not incompat- 
ible with liberty ; for it does not excite those insatiable desires of 
fame and power which have proved so fatal to great republics. As 
there is no common centre to the country, vast capital cities, colossal 
wealth, abject poverty, and sudden revolutions, are alike unknown ; 
and political passion, instead of spreading over the land like a tor- 
rent of desolation, spends its strength against the interests and the 
individual passion of every State. 

" Nevertheless, all commodities and ideas circulate throughout the 
Union as freely as in a country inhabited by one people. Nothing 
checks the spirit of enterprise. The government avails itself of the 
assistance of all who have talents or knowledge to serve it. Within 
the frontiers of the Union the profoundest peace prevails, as within 
the heart of some great empire ; abroad, it ranks with the most pow- 
erful nations of the earth ; thousands of miles of its coast are open 
to the commerce of the world ; and, as it possesses the keys of the 
globe, its flag is respected in the most remote seas. The Union is as 
happy and as free as a small people, and as glorious and as strong as 
a great nation." 

36 



CHAPTEE XI. 

BRITISH PROVINCES AND PROVINCIAL CITIES. 

Sketches of the leading towns and cities of Great Britain and Ireland, and their points of 
similarity with places in America. — A chapter to supply the place of a map. — Glimp- 
ses of daily life in town and country. 

In the United States the loudest roar is in the conflict of parties ; 
next is the clash of great interests ; then the challenge between city 
and city. In cities modern freedom began, where in Italy and Flan- 
ders the tradesmen bought their liberties of their Lords, and main- 
tained them by courage or advantageous alliances. In England, as 
w r e have seen, there are now many municipalities like our own,— 
small republics in the heart of the British Empire, — and also a few 
old-time cities, like London, governed by their guilds or trades- 
companies. Of cities of the latter sort we have no examples, nor 
are any of our cities independent of the State in which they are situ- 
ated, but derive their charters from the States, and acknowledge the 
same as liable to be altered by the State Legislatures. English cities 
have this important advantage, — that they are, in nothing material, 
subject to the County which encloses them. The greatest of the 
English cities is called the Metropolis, and the secondary cities go by 
the name of the Provincial cities. Middlesex, the County of London, 
is called the Metropolitan County, and the other rural districts are 
called Provinces. London is the British metropolis in all respects 
of population, commerce, legislation, money, capital, and social in- 
fluence. We have no undisputed metropolis in America, and it is 
affectation or bluster for any one city to allege it. New York is at 
present the commercial metropolis, and Washington is the political 
metropolis. But San Francisco has commercial opportunities w T hich 
almost outpromise New York, and if, in the destiny of events, Ha- 
vana should become ours, it may yet lay claim to this title. Neither 
the political nor commercial pivot of the United States is yet fixed 
with certainty, but this is a common point in Great Britain, long ago 
ascertained. 




A^rf: 




SEATS OF MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT. 
1-The Citv Hall, New York. 2-The City Hall, Paris. 3-New City Hall, Baltimore. 
4— The City Hall, London. 5-The City Hall, Brussels. 



BRITISH PROVINCES AND PROVINCIAL CITIES. 283 

An American visiting England will disembark at Southampton, 
on the south coast, or at Liverpool on the north-west. He may also 
find steamers to Cork, and to Loncloncleny, in Ireland, or to Glas- 
gow, in Scotland, or even to London. But practically, all great 
passenger trade between the United States and Great Britain goes to 
Liverpool, which is the seaport of Manchester, Bradford, Leeds, 
Sheffield, and Birmingham, and which grew into importance almost 
entirely by the American trade. When steamship commerce began 
across the Atlantic, the city of Bristol made earnest show of rivalry 
with Liverpool. Bristol equipped a steamship, and sent it to New 
York, but before it could get off, the Liverpoolers despatched an old 
tub of a tug, which barely lived to New York, but beat the Bristol 
ship some days, and exhausted the glory of the feat. Bristol had, 
in 1861, but one hundred and fifty-five thousand people, while Liver- 
pool had four hundred and forty-four thousand. Bristol has no such 
series of great towns in the rear of it as Liverpool, nor a railway 
system exhaustive as her rival's ; but Bristol is still the third city in 
England, commercially, and inhabited by a more generous and be- 
nignant people than Liverpool ; it never produced, in our periods of 
trouble, such enemies as the Lairds and the Spences. Liverpool is 
one of the most depraved and selfish cities in the world, having 
neither the independence of Manchester, nor the beauty of Bristol. 
Southampton and Hull follow Bristol, in importance, as commercial 
towns in England, the former having about fifty thousand people, and 
the latter, one hundred thousand. 

The city of Baltimore in America has recently made earnest strides 
toward commercial importance, and sanguine expectations have been 
formed of the growth of Norfolk, Charleston, and Portland. There 
are many remarkable harbors in America which have declined in 
importance by reason of the decline of our commerce ; witness New- 
port, New Bedford, and New London. As a rule, the ports of 
Europe are poor compared with those of America in depth of water 
and extent of anchorage ground. 

In populousness, the principal American cities stand to British 
cities, thus : — 



284 



THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 



MANUFACTURING CITIES. 


COMMERCIAL CITIES. 


America 


i. 


Great Britain. 


Great Britain. 


America 


(• 


Philadelphia, 


600,000 


Manchester, 475,000 


! Liverpool, 


445,000 


Baltimore, 


300,000 


Cincinnati, 


275,000 


Birmingham, 300,000 


Glasgow, 


390,000 


Boston, 


200,000 


Pittsburg, \ 




Dublin, 265,000 


! Bristol, 

| 


155,000 


New Orleans, 


150,000 


Alleghany, > 


200,000 


Leeds, 210,000 


Belfast, 


155,000 


Buffalo, 


85,000 


etc., * 




Sheffield, 190,000 


i Newcastle, 


115,000 


Charleston, 


45,000 


Louisville,. 


80,000 


Wolv'rhampt'n, 150,000 


Plymouth n 




Richmond, 


45,000 


Newark, N.J. , 


110,000 


Bradford, 110,000 


and > 


115,000 


Portland, 


30,000 


Albany ^ 
and Troy, ) 


90,000 


Stoke, 101,000 
Preston, 94,000 


Devonport, J 
Hull, 


100,000 


Cleveland, 
Detroit, 


70,000 
50,000 


Providence, 


55,000 


Bolton, 85,000 


Portsmouth, 


100,000 


Chicago, 


300,000 


Lowell, 


40,000 


Blackburne, 70,000 


Sunderland, 


85,000 


St. Louis, 


200,000 


Manchester, ) 
N.H., \ 


25,000 


Paisley, 55,000 


Edinburgh, 

Cork, 

Dundee, 

Aberdeen, 

Southampton, 

Greenock, 


170,000 
75,000 
95,000 
75,000 
50,000 
45,000 


Milwaukie, 
San Francisco, 


60,000 
120,000 





In the above list I have given the presumed population of both 
British and American cities, in 1866. The census has not yet been 
taken in America, for 1870, and between the jealousy of American 
cities it is probable that some persons may take exception to my fig- 
ures. I think that the above estimates are nearly correct, however, 
for many cities in both countries have fallen off in the past ten years 
rather than increased. Some towns, like Edinburgh and Dublin, are 
neither commercial nor manufacturing towns, or are both. 

Over the broad belt of the United States reside probably thirty-five 
millions of people. In the small British islands dwell thirty millions. 
There are two main islands of the United Kingdom, Great Britain 
(which comprises England, Wales, and Scotland) and Ireland. For 
the channel and sea which divide these two islands substitute the 
plains and deserts west of the Mississippi, and we may construct an 
Ireland on the Pacific coast of the United States. Then Galway 
would occupy the place of San Francisco, and Galway has but twenty- 



BRITISH PROVINCES AND PROVINCIAL CITIES. 285 

three thousand inhabitants. Portland, in Oregon, might be compared 
to Londonderry, or Deny, which has twenty thousand inhabitants. 
Dublin, the end of the chief ferry between England and Ireland, re- 
sembles in place Virginia City, the first town reached on the Pa- 
cific Railroad, after passing the desert. Cork might be put in place 
of Guaymas, our probable port on the South Pacific, and the termi- 
nus of a projected railway. 

Following out the same fanc}^, and returning to the more populous 
island of Great Britain, we shall see that Wales is attached to Eng- 
land like a pair of promontories. Call the northern promontory of 
Anglesey, Kansas, and the southern promontory of Pembroke, Texas ; 
then Leavenworth will compare with Holyhead, the ferry slip to Dub- 
lin, and Austin or Houston will stand in stead of Pembroke, a great 
naval station of England. Salt Lake city is merely an island in the 
desert, like the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea. 

The Mississippi Kiver, dividing the United States north and south, 
is our coast line. For the Ohio River substitute Bristol Channel ; 
then Cincinnati becomes the city of Bristol. For the Illinois River 
substitute the Mersey ; then St. Louis becomes Liverpool, and Chicago 
is Manchester. St. Paul in Minnesota is Glasgow in Scotland. 

Behind Chicago-, manufacturing articles for it to despatch westward 
across the plains is a cluster of rising cities, Detroit, Toledo, Fort 
Wayne, Cleveland. Behind Manchester, manufacturing goods to 
swell its mighty contribution westward, are Blackburn, Bolton, Pres- 
ton, Rochdale. 

Following the south coasts of Great Britain and the United States 
eastward, Galveston will become Plymouth, and New Orleans South- 
ampton ; Portsmouth in England stands for Mobile, and Brighton 
for Pensacola. Turning Florida and proceeding up the coast of the 
Atlantic, the Gulf Stream is the Strait of Dover as the Gulf of 
Mexico was the English Channel ; London becomes Savannah ; the 
Humber is the Chesapeake, and upon its various streams are Hull, 
its Norfolk ; Nottingham, its Richmond ; Sheffield, its Washington ; 
Leeds, its Baltimore, and York, which is as much like York, Penn- 
S} r lvania, or Lancaster, or Harrisburg, as anything I can think of; 
Newcastle-upon-Tyne is Philadelphia, both great coal ports. Edin- 
burgh is New York, Providence is Dundee, Boston is Aberdeen, and 
Portland is Inverness. Birmingham is tributary to Bristol Channel, 
and compares in position with Pittsburg. 

The above may enable the 'reader, without consulting the map, to 



286 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

keep the geography of England in mind, and there are some curious 
facts with regard to the colonization and civilization of the United 
Kingdom which readily adjust themselves to the above comparisons. 
England, like the United States, was settled and christianized from 
the East ; the south-eastern parts of both empires were first settled ; 
in the north of England as in the north of the United States, Cal- 
vinism took permanent root, while the Established or Episcopal 
Church fixed itself in the Southern States as in the south of England. 
These and many other reflections will occur to the student of a sug- 
gestive turn of mind. In this little United Kingdom dwell more 
than thirty millions of people. Leaving out New York and Massachu- 
setts, there are as many people in the British Isles as in the United 
States ; there are two hundred and thirty-nine people to the square 
mile in the British Kingdom, and in England and Wales three hun- 
dred and forty-seven to the square mile. Yet the greatest length of 
Great Britain is only six hundred and eight miles, about as far as 
from New York city to Toledo, Ohio ; while the greatest width is 
two hundred and eighty miles, or the distance from New Y'ork city to 
Elmira. In one place the island of Great Britain is only thirty-three 
miles wide, or the distance from Washington to Baltimore, and the 
tides of the North Sea and the Atlantic rise within eighteen miles of 
each other. 

In the New England States of America, there are about fifty peo- 
ple to the square mile ; in the Middle States and Ohio, seventy ; in 
the North-western States, twenty-two ; and in California, two. 

Before the civil war the population of our Southern States was only 
half as dense as that of Russia in Europe. 

In England proper, and Wales, live twenty millions of people, or as 
many as inhabit our Middle, Southern, and seven North-western States. 

Turkey is more densely peopled than our six Middle States. Eng- 
land and Wales comprise fifty-eight thousand three hundred and 
twenty square miles, or five thousand less than the New England 
States. Scotland contains about three millions of people on half 
the area of New England, which latter has about the same number 
of people. Ireland contains more than five and a half millions of 
people, or about the population of our seven North-western States. 
There were in 1861 three millions seven hundred and thirty-nine 
thousand five hundred and five inhabited houses in England and 
Wales. Wales alone contains about one million one hundred thou- 
sand people, or less than Massachusetts. 



BRITISH PROVINCES AND PROVINCIAL CITIES. 287 

We divide America superficially into the New England, the Mid- 
dle, the Southern, and the Western States. England proper is 
divided into the Northern Counties, the Midland Counties, the East- 
ern Counties, the Southern Counties, and the Western Counties. Our 
boundary lines between these sections are the Hudson, the Potomac, 
the Ohio and the Alleghan}^ Rivers ; the corresponding rivers of Eng- 
land are the Plumber and Mersey, the Thames, and the Severn. The 
eastern part of the United States is separated from the valleys of 
the Mississippi and the St. Lawrence by the Appalachian Mountains, 
generally called the Alleghanies ; so the most important range of 
British mountains guards the coast of the western channel, and 
forms the interlinking Pennine, Cambrian, and Devonian ranges. Of 
these latter the highest peaks are in Wales, where Mount Snowdon 
is three thousand five hundred and seventy-one feet high. The 
highest peaks of the Alleghanies are in western North Carolina, 
where, under the general name of the Black Mountains, they rise to 
the altitude of six thousand seven hundred and fifty-five feet. In 
Vermont the Alleghanies rise in Mount Mansfield to four thousand 
two hundred and seventy-nine feet, in Maine to Mount Katahdin, 
five thousand three hundred and eighty-five feet, and in New Hamp- 
shire to Mount Washington, six thousand four hundred and ninety- 
six feet. The highest mountains in Scotland rise to less than four 
thousand four hundred feet, and the highest in Ireland to three thou- 
sand four hundred and four feet. Scotland is the White Mountain 
region of America ; Wales is the Adirondack country. The Blue 
Mountains of the United States, which are called the Highlands in 
New York, are also matched by a secondary range in England, which 
crosses that kingdom north-eastward. The larger English rivers are 
of nearly equal lengths with our Eastern streams ; the Severn is 
longer than the Hudson, and the Thames larger than the Merrimac. 
A most thorough and complex system of canals connects all the rivers 
of England, and the interior of that island is a minute web of mutu- 
ally contributing streams. But the British canals are not upon the 
grand scale of the Erie, the Pennsylvania, or the Potomac canals in 
America. They scarcely compare with the Chesapeake and Delaware, 
the Rondout, or the Raritan canals. Few masted vessels are to be seen 
crossing from river to river by these British canals, but chiefly small 
barges laden with coal or crude metallic freight. Much of the canal 
is creek ; for what are called rivers in England are often no biowr 

' O DO 

than the Conestoga or the Brandy wine creeks. The Avon, whereon 



288 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

Shakespeare lived, is in many places a winding brook merely, and the 
same we have seen to be true of the Cam at Cambridge. English 
scenery, however, arranged upon this miniature scale, is more various 
and compendious within a small circuit than we find it in America. 
The arms of the salt sea, the mountainous hills, the ancient village, 
the barren moors, the bald tableland, the sequestered valley, the forest, 
are frequently found within the compass of a morning's ride. Not 
all the industry of a dense population has assimilated these various 
features to a uniform appearance ; but in America nature is planned 
upon a broad scale, and the equal institutions and ages of the people 
have made all the dwellings, all the farms, all the villages within a 
wide circuit, look like counterparts of each other. 

If we wished to select that one American city close about which 
lie the most diversified sceneries, it would probably be Boston. 
The sea and the mountains are its neighbors ; lakes and broad, salty 
marshes are also amongst its intimate associations ; the largest 
manufactories and some -of the most cultivated farms are in its 
neighborhood ; whaling and fishing ports are within easy reach ; 
large islands like Nantucket lie not far over its horizon ; university 
life can be studied in its environs ; cattle, horses, and sheep of the 
best breed known to Europe have been imported by its gentlemen- 
farmers. The States of Ehode Island and New Hampshire are 
within thirty miles ; Maine, Connecticut, and Vermont are not 
beyond the average of twice that distance ; the Merrimac, the Con- 
necticut, the Narragansett are within picnicking distance by steam. 

But measure these by the country charms of London. Not five, 
but ten, dissimilar counties lie within twenty miles, and eight of 
them radiate from London like the spokes from^a wheel-hub. Boston 
has been called the " Hub of the Universe," but probably by some 
one who had ambitiously likened it to London. In these English 
counties all varieties of dialect, avocation, and landscape lie ; the peo- 
ple differ in any two of these counties more than in any two Ameri- 
can States, and their products are more unlike than those of Con- 
necticut and Delaware. Suppose we undertake to make the circuit 
of some of these counties hastily. 

Berkshire, a county to the west of London, is celebrated for its 
pigs, many of which have been imported into America ; they have 
thick jowls, short snouts, and upright ears ; the best breed is black, 
with white spots. A Berkshire man says, " I telled him so smack 
to his head ; " meaning, " I said it to his face." Windsor and Read- 



BRITISH PROVINCES AND PROVINCIAL CITIES. 289 

ing are the leading towns here ; the latter is about half the size 
of Reading, Pennsylvania ; the American Reading deals chiefly in 
beer, the English in biscuits ; both of them are in counties called 
Berks. 

Buckinghamshire, within half an hour north-west of London, is a 
great pasture count}', and on its one hundred and fifty thousand acres 
of meadows feed twenty thousand milch cows, and it sends, also, 
to London, a hundred thousand dollars' worth of ducks every year. 
Straw-plait and thread-lace are its manufactures ; its county-seat is 
the most uninteresting town in England. This county is commonly 
called Bucks. 

Oxfordshire, between Berks and Bucks, one hour from London, is 
riveted to both those counties by the Chiltern Hills, nine hundred 
feet high. It is a poor county. Oxford city is described in the chap- 
ter on the Universities. 

Kent, which comes quite up to London, is one of the richest coun- 
ties in the world, as well as one of the most historic. It forms the 
south bank of the River Thames, from London to the sea, and like a 
cape thrusts itself to within sight of France. The river Medway, 
flowing through it, reaches the sea just at the mouth of the Thames ; 
and at the mouth of the Medway is Sheerness, the great dock-yard ; 
and up the Medway, ten miles, is Chatham, a naval station. The 
mouth of the Thames goes by the name of " The Naze." In the 
interior of Kent are the sizable towns of Rochester, Maidstone, and 
Canterbury. Dover, on the coast, maintains steam ferries, with 
Calais, in France, opposite, and many watering-places lie along the 
Kentish water line. This is the greenest and foggiest county in 
England, and a good deal of it is agueish. It used to be a kingdom 
by itself, and is full of Roman camps, ruins of abbeys, and old 
battle-fields. Cherries and hops are the great products here ; there 
are sixty thousand acres planted in hops, which is half the hop crop 
of all England. Hop-picking in Kent is a more sprightly scene than 
grape-picking in France. We raise the main quantity of American 
hops in the interior of New York State. Paper is the chief manu- 
facturing product of Kent. 

The County of Sussex swings round south of Kent, and faces 
France by the English Channel. Hastings, where William the Con- 
queror landed, is in this county ; also Chichester, where there is a great 
cathedral, and Lewes, the prettiest town in South England, where the 
breed of Southdown sheep was first developed, by Ellman. Here, also, 
37 



290 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

is Brighton, the Long Branch of London, and the greatest watering- 
place in the kingdom, with a population of seventy thousand, and with 
forty thousand visitors a year. It is very expensive, costing a third 
more than hotel prices in London. It is more than a hundred years 
old, as a fashionable place, is very ugly, has a beach of " shingle," 
poor to American notions, and a long pier reaching out to deep 
water. The South-downs, in Sussex, is a range of chalk heights, 
fifty-three miles long, within sight of the sea. Sussex is a county of 
relapsed industry, but very peculiar. 

Hampshire continues the circle round London to the south-west. 
It is commonly called Hants, and in the centre of it is the old 
Saxon capital of Winchester, one of the most interesting cities of 
England, while on its coast line are Southampton, and Portsmouth, 
large commercial and naval cities. In Winchester, Alfred the Great 
was born, and Canute was buried ; it was founded before the Christian 
era ; William* the Conqueror thought it second only to London in 
importance ; here Philip and Mary, the tyrannical royal pair, were 
married ; Izaak Walton, prince of fishermen, is buried in the cathe- 
dral ; the income of the latter edifice is one hundred and ten thousand 
dollars a year. There is an ancient school here, feeder to Oxford. 
Winchester has only fourteen thousand inhabitants, at present ; the 
name of the town means " camp on the downs," and Chester every- 
where means camp, as Manchester, " camp of tents." Portsmouth, 
like the name of all towns ending with " mouth," signifies the place 
at the mouth of the port or river ; but we have misapplied the term 
in America. Portsmouth stands on an island three miles long, and 
two and a half miles wide ; it contains seventy-two thousand people ; 
its harbor is two miles wide, and on the other shore is Gosport. The 
Isle of Wight makes a breakwater for Portsmouth, and the channel 
between Wight and the shore makes the celebrated roads called Spit- 
head, the Hampton Roads of England. Portsmouth is strongly forti- 
fied, and invested with shipping. New York is not as well defended. 
Its dockyard contains one hundred and twenty acres, and is the 
longest in England. Here lies Nelson's ship, the Victory, in which 
he died, and here, according to English history, Jack Aitken was 
hanged for burning clown the ropery, in 1776, at the suggestion of 
Silas Deane, the American agent at Paris. For more about Ports- 
mouth, see the chapter on the Army and Navy. Southampton stands 
at the head of a beautiful sound called Southampton Water, sixteen 
miles from Cowes, on the Isle of Wight. It was the original nurse 



BRITISH PROVINCES AND PROVINCIAL CITIES. 291 

of British commerce. It has nearly eight times the population it 
contained in 1840. Its environs are very beautiful, and its docks are 
spacious. The Isle of Wight is to the English coast very much 
what Staten Island is to New York, excepting that the latter is much 
smaller. Its scenery is renowned throughout the world ; it is the 
site of one of the Queen's palaces, the seat of many beautiful villas, 
amongst which is that of the poet Tenny son, and at Cowes, its chief 
town, the famous Royal Yacht Club has its head-quarters. 

Hertfordshire, north of London a few miles, is commonly called 
Herts. It contains many beautiful gardens, and orchards, which 
supply London with fruit ; the English apples are far inferior to those 
of America, being watery, and lacking flavor. Enormous quantities 
of hay and straw are sent from Herts to London, but the remarkable 
product of the county is malt, and the town of Ware, which lies in 
this county, is the chief seat of the malting trade in Great Britain. 
The beautiful Abbey of St. Albans, a favorite resort of American 
and British artists, is in Herts, about thirty miles north of London. 

Bedfordshire, also north of London, is almost exclusively an agri- 
cultural county ; a good deal of freestone and lime goes thence to 
London, and there are fine old Roman ruins in the county. 

Essex, to the east of London, holds the mouth of the Thames, on 
the north, as Kent does on the south ; the two counties are of much 
the same size. Broad marshes from the North Sea extend into 
Essex, and many inlets and streams penetrate it. It was the land of 
the Great Briton King Caractacus. Large numbers of calves go 
from Essex to London. It is a wheat county, and it produces, besides, 
the British oyster, that small and coppery mollusk, which is the de- 
light of London cockneys, and which, they insist, has no equal in the 
world for flavor. An American, used to the great oysters of New 
York waters, and the delicious bivalves of the Chesapeake, can 
scarcely be persuaded to touch the British "Native" oyster. Our 
American oysters have been transplanted to the coasts of France and 
Belgium, and to the Baltic ; but the British epicure, with national ob- 
stinacy, clings to his domestic oyster, which will neither make a soup, 
a roast, a broil, or a fry. 

The counties which have been above enumerated, immediately 
enclose London, and minister to its appetites ; they send tons of 
rabbit, hare, pheasant, and partridge, to the great metropolis, and 
although almost within sound of its bells, they retain to this day, 
their ancient dialects and peculiarities. Tens of thousands of their 



292 THE NEW WOKLD COMPAEED WITH THE OLD. 

inhabitants have never visited London ; others have entered the city 
but once, as on the occasion of the coronation of the Queen. 

There are two provincial cities of England which may be said to be 
of even rival political consequence with London : these are Manches- 
ter and Birmingham. Since the development of steam, and its appli- 
cation to machinery, these two great cities have, in a manner, resumed 
the activity, individuality, and influence which the great cities of the 
middle ages exercised. Neither Ghent, Bruges, nor Florence, were 
more aggressive in their best days, when their guilds maintained the 
honor of the corporation, than Manchester and Birmingham, with their 
powerful trades-unions, their debating societies, their political asso- 
ciations, and the community of sentiment which exists between "em- 
ployers and employed. These two cities may almost be said to have 
solely accomplished the success of the three great English movements 
of our century, namely, Parliamentary Reform (first, in 1832, sec- 
ond in 1867), the repeal of the Corn Laws, and Free Trade. And, 
it is probable that, but for the influence of Manchester and Birming- 
ham, which were sturdily in favor of American union and prosperit}', 
and were represented in Parliament by clear heads and eloquent 
tongues, the separation of our republic would have been recognized 
by the British Prime Minister, and the woes of the North and the 
South prolonged in consequence. 

The attitude of Manchester, in particular, partook of the sublime ; 
by the loss of American cotton many of her mills closed, and tens 
of thousands of operatives were thrown upon public charity. Never- 
theless, the sacrificing spinners and weavers never ceased to bid 
America God-speed, and to decry any recognition of her ruin. 
Birmingham suffered less, but her spirit was the same, and the 
behavior of these hives of operatives was in striking contrast w r ith 
the base and envious expression of Liverpool, a city which had fat- 
tened by her relations with the United States, and which had equipped 
the slavers which assisted to plant the curse of slavery in America. 
As early as 1708 slave-ships from the Mersey sailed to Africa, took 
aboard human cargoes, and delivered them up in Virginia and the 
Carolinas, w T hence the vessels returned laden with tobacco, sugar, 
and the native products of the infant world. In 1752 there were one 
hundred and one slave-dealing houses in Liverpool. 

But two other cities exercise an approximate influence in English 
politics with Manchester and Birmingham, and that is of an en- 
tirely different character, namely, Edinburgh and Dublin, the latter by 



BRITISH PROVINCES AND PROVINCIAL CITIES. 293 

means of its turbulent populace and its discontented newspaper press 
having largely assisted to shorten the days of the Established Church 
in Ireland. The political influence of Edinburgh is of an intellectual 
sort, its solid and massive thinkers making themselves felt through 
their periodical reviews and books of political philosophy. Com- 
pared with the political status of American cities, Edinburgh holds 
the rank of Boston, the seat of original thought ; Dublin the place 
of a former Charleston, South Carolina, the abode of destructive agita- 
tion ; while Manchester and Birmingham resemble Chicago and the 
great cities of the north-west, powerful by their numbers and decided 
in their convictions ; London is New York, tradesman-like, rich, con- 
servative, and merged in its vast accumulations. 

Pittsburg has been called the American Birmingham, but, while 
their branches of industry are the same, their appearances are widely 
different. Birmingham stands upon a great plain nearly at the cen- 
tre of England and Wales, its multitude of chimney-stacks vomiting 
bituminous smoke, its mighty suburb of Wolverhampton seeming to 
be one of its volcanic children. 

The manufacturing industry of the town is chiefly the growth of 
the present century. Its manufactures comprise almost every descrip- 
tion of iron and steel goods, brass and iron, founding, saddlery, fire- 
arms, cutleiy, gold, silver, plated, bronze, ormolu, and japanned 
wares ; papier-mache goods, toys, jewelry, electro-plated goods, but- 
tons, steel pens, glass, tools, steam-engines, and machinery of all 
kinds. The steam-engines employed in its factories are supposed to 
have a force of between six thousand and seven thousand horse-power, 
and the annual values of its manufactures have been estimated at 
five million dollars. The immense coal and iron beds of the district 
by which Birmingham is surrounded may be viewed as the main 
source of its prosperity, which has also been greatly aided by canals 
communicating with the Thames, Mersey, Severn, Trent, and Humber, 
and more recently by railroads, which bring the metropolis and all 
the great towns of the north of England within a few hours' journey. 
This town is supposed to have been a place where arms were manu- 
factured by the ancient Britons. 

Wolverhampton, close by, is no less busy ; the smelting of iron 
ore, and its conversion into pig, railroad, sheet, hoop, rod, and nail 
iron, boiler-plates, castings, etc., constitute its staple manufacture 
and trade ; and almost every article produced from brass, steel, and 
tin is made in Wolverhampton to a greater or less extent. The 



294 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

facilities enjoyed in carrying on these important trades are very 
ample, and the advantages of canal communication have long been 
possessed by these twin cities. 

Like Birmingham, Pittsburg stands in the heart of the great 
bituminous coal regions ; it also has its energetic suburbs, one of 
which takes the name of its English rival. Much of its prosperity is 
due, like Birmingham's, to the completeness of its canal and water 
navigation, and, like Birmingham, it manufactures enormous quantities 
of ploughs, stoves, nails, bolts, cannon, railroad iron, engines, boilers, 
and whatever iron can be wrought into. But the natural site of Pitts- 
burg is far more magnificent than that of Birmingham. 

Pittsburg in winter is the grandest coup d'ceil of American indus- 
try. You sail up the brown current of the Ohio, round the capes of 
mighty hills, past islands in fertile sleep under the snows, till before 
you, like a portent of some vast volcano, a wall of darkness rises 
against the sky. You cleave this wall, guided b} r the lurid light- 
houses of riverside furnaces, and the snow on either side is pitted and 
flecked with showering bitumen. Down the sluices of the river the 
frequent steamers swing, pitchily breathing ; huge vats and flats of 
coal go round the headlands in tow of some Hunnish tug ; the vine- 
yards far up the hills should bring forth in this atmosphere such 
scorched wine as they have in Eblis ; gulfs and pits gap out of the 
hill faces ; human insects move along the cindery cliffs ; a railway 
train darts up the brink, like a dingy flash of lightning ; suddenly, 
through the deepening twilight of a terrified mid-day, the outlines 
of something in dim relief stand across the horizon, carved against 
the mountain background. Two pale, diverging perspectives enclose 
it, — they are rivers ; a blackened tower, and ribbed buttresses crown 
it, — a cathedral ; a fringe of lace blows round this funeral city, — 
the white and carved line of steamboats ; from either side a riven 
amphitheatre of mountains, their blasted summits bare, their slopes 
the jaws of mines, their bases dense with population, enclose this 
city, and leaping from its plain to them, the bridges stand like the 
ribs of burnt rainbows, or, standing at anchor, hear the railway 
trains rush through them like the roar of fire. Drawing yet nearer 
the clumped furnaces fall apart, and by their blaze you see the high 
hotels, the spires, the broad-paved levee. You hear the hammers, 
the cheer of stevedores, the whistle of uninterrupted engines ; you 
smell the burning coke kilns, the gases of the ores and coals ; by 
memory you know that at every ticking of the clock a pound of nails 



BRITISH PROVINCES AND PROVINCIAL CITIES. 295 

drops out of the din, a pocket-knife and plough every minute, a mile 
of railroad iron an hour, a steam-boiler a day, a steam-engine twice a 
week. 

Entering the city, still dark, — except on Sundays or holidays, 
when a shaft of clear sunlight sometimes stabs through the smoke, — 
you see chiefly rectangular streets ; at one end of the town is the con- 
fluence of railroads ; at the other the confluence of rivers. The Pan 
Handle, the Wheeling, the Connellsville, the Pennsylvania Trunk, 
the Alleghany Valley, the Chicago and Fort Wayne, the Erie, the 
Youngstown and Cleveland, the Tuscawaras and Cleveland, join in 
the main into one union depot, sentinelled by a great grain elevator. 
Beyond this depot, six miles in the country, the huge stockyards lie. 
Down the Alleghany, oil and lumber pour by day and darkness ; down 
the Monongahela, coal and iron in uninterrupted continuity ; to the 
eastward, for two hundred and fifty miles, there is no considerable 
city. Kine daily papers control this great territory, representing all 
party shades. 

As a curious instance of opposite nomenclature we may note 
that the large hotels of Pittsburg take the sounding names of the 
" Monongahela," and the " St. Charles," while the principal hotel of 
Birmingham is called the " Hen and Chickens." 

Manchester has also its American rivals in the series of cotton 
manufacturing towns which surround Boston, one of which, in New 
Hampshire, ambitiously calls itself Manchester. With the English 
city, however, the history not only of the cotton manufacture, but of 
the application of steam to spinning and weaving, will always be 
identified. 

In 1763, the first spinning-jenny was constructed by Thomas 
Highs, a reed-maker, at Leigh, in the environs of Manchester. This 
was improved upon by James Hargreaves, of Blackburn, close by the 
same city, in 1767. Richard Arkwright, in 1769, took out a patent for 
spinning by means of rollers, which, in 1799, received considerable 
improvements from Samuel Crompton. Arkwright's patents were set 
aside, in 1781 and 1785, by the influence of Sir Robert Peel, in which 
latter year the Rev. Edward Cartwright invented the power-loom, 
and the trade being thus set free and furnished with the needful 
machines, other inventions and improvements followed, and a rapid 
increase in the cotton trade was the consequence. In 1789, the first 
steam-engine for spinning cotton was erected in Manchester, and 
from that year, the manufacturing prosperity of the town may date 



296 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

its rise. At present two hundred and fifty large mills are engaged in 
the making of textile fabrics in Manchester, which employ about 
fifty thousand persons ; one hundred and fifty mills and thirty-five 
thousand persons are employed in cotton spinning and weaving ; five 
mills and three hundred persons in woollen and worsted spinning and 
weaving ; fifty-five mills and eight thousand persons in silk-throwing 
and small wares ; five mills and one thousand five hundred persons in 
fiax-spinning, and forty works and three thousand five hundred per- 
sons in printing calicoes, etc. Besides these distinguished branches 
of industry, Manchester has extensive machine shops, chemical 
works, breweries, and numerous other industrial establishments. 

Lowell, which has been called the American Manchester, contains 
less than one-tenth the population of the English city ; thirteen mil- 
lions of dollars are invested in its cotton mills ; it has thirteen thou- 
sand looms, the same number of operatives ; four hundred thousand 
spindles, and it makes two and a half million yards of cotton goods 
a week ; more than half a million of dollars are invested in its 
machine shops. All English visitors to the United States have re- 
marked the superiority of Lowell over Manchester in the cleanliness 
of mills and operatives, and in the intellect and decorum of the latter. 
Mr. Anthony Trollope says : " Women's wages, including all that 
they receive at the Lowell factories, average about fourteen shillings 
a week, which is, I take it, fully a third more than women can earn 
in Manchester. But if wages at Manchester were raised to the Lowell 
standard, the Manchester women would not be clothed, fed, cared for, 
and educated like the Lowell women. The fact is, that the workmen 
and the workwomen at Lowell are not exposed to the chances of an 
open-labor market. They are taken in, as it were, to a philanthrop- 
ical manufacturing college, and then looked after and regulated 
more as girls and lads at a great seminary, than as hands by whose 
industry profit is to be made out of capital. Lowell is the realiza- 
tion of a commercial Utopia. 

" The States in these matters," continues the same superficial ob- 
server, " have had a great advantage over England.. They have been 
able to begin at the beginning. Manufactories have grown up among 
us as our cities grow, — from the necessities and chances of the times. 
When labor was wanted, it was obtained in the ordinary way ; and so 
when houses were built, they were built in the ordinary way. We 
had not the experience and the results either for good or bad, of 
other nations to guide us. The Americans, in seeing and resolving 



BRITISH PROVINCES AND PROVINCIAL CITIES. 297 

to adopt our commercial successes, have resolved also, if possible, to 
avoid the evils which have attended those successes. It would be 
very desirable that all our factory girls should read and write, wear 
clean clothes, have decent beds, and eat hot meat every day. But 
that is now impossible. Gradually, with very up-hill work, but still, 
I trust, with sure work, much will be done to improve their position 
and render their life respectable ; but in England we can have no 
Lowells." 

Manchester in England is very old, historically, but it obtained 
corporate powers and privileges so recently as 1840 ; it is said to 
have traded with the Greeks of Marseilles in woven goods very early 
in the Christian era ; like almost all the weaving interests of England, 
however, it received its most valuable accessions of workmen from 
France and Flanders ; and thus, the Huguenots, whom Louis XIV. 
expelled, raised against France so rich an empire that it could sub- 
sidize all the armies of Europe. The greatest names of Manchester 
are, perhaps, the greatest of Great Britain also, in practical useful- 
ness and wise statesmanship, — Sir Robert Peel and Richard Cobden ; 
to support the measures of these arose the greatest English orator of 
the century, — John Bright. 

As Manchester was the birthplace of many appliances in the cot- 
ton manufacture, America produced the cotton gin, without which 
looms, mules, and spools would have been valueless. America is also 
author of the sewing-machine, which makes every home a miniature 
Manchester. In 1830, the first railroad in England was opened from 
Manchester to Liverpool. The cotton manufactures have perma- 
nently added two mhlions to the British population. 

Liverpool is merely the port of entry and departure for the staples 
and manufactures of Manchester and its progeny. At the time of the 
American Revolution, Liverpool had a population of seventy-five 
thousand, and Manchester zealously contributed troops to put down 
the American rebels. 

The exports of Liverpool exceed those of all other British ports 
combined ; its docks and basins cover several hundred acres, and the 
Albert dock and warehouses alone cost two and a half million of dol- 
lars. Both Liverpool and Manchester are monotonous cities, but the 
former has some pleasant environs, and it possesses in St. George's 
Hall the finest edifice in the United Kingdom ; it is the richest cor- 
poration in the kingdom, London excepted ; and the income of the 
municipality is nearly one and a half million of dollars a year ; there 
38 



298 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

are fourteen miles of quays in Liverpool, all of which are controlled 
by the Dock Committee and the Corporation, jointly. 

Birkenhead, the Jersey City of Liverpool, since the formation of 
its docks, has progressed so rapidly, that in a few years it must 
prove both a commercial rival and an auxiliary to Liverpool. Up- 
wards of one hundred and twenty-five million dollars have been ex- 
pended upon the improvements of the Mersey and the formation of 
twenty-four docks, whereby a stormy estuary and an unsafe anchorage 
have been converted into the most perfect harbor ever constructed. 
The Mersey is a short arm of the Irish sea, and the city stands al- 
most in sight of the river's mouth. The ships from Liverpool were 
always competitors of those of New York ; the American clipper 
ships outsail the English, but in the celebrated contest between 
the great Collins' steamship line of New York, and the Cunard line 
of Liverpool, the superior vigilance, economy, and caution of the 
English prevailed over our rash management ; by accident we lost 
two of our finest steamers ; our government subsidy was withdrawn, 
and the Collins' line disappeared from the sea. Scarcely inferior 
to its American trade is Liverpool's commerce with Australia. 

Bristol has ceased to be a formidable rival to Liverpool, and it oc- 
cupies the same relation in commerce to that city, which Philadelphia 
now yields to New York. The Bristol docks were first opened in 
1809, and the old channel of the Avon was converted into one float- 
ing harbor about three miles in length. The existing manufactures 
of the city are glass, brassware, pens, sheet lead, zinc', spelter, chain 
cables, anchors, machinery, drugs, paints, dyes, floor-cloth, earthen- 
ware, refined sugar, starch, soap, spirits, tin, copper, and iron wares, 
bricks, beer, porter, pipes, tobacco, and hats. Hull is the principal 
English port on the North Sea, and stands in a similar relation to 
the other English seaports that Buffalo holds to America ; which lat- 
ter yields competition on the ocean, and aims to secure the traffic 
of the lakes, as Hull of the North Sea. The ships of Hull ply to 
Holland, Denmark, Sweden, and the Baltic ; it was the city of Rob- 
inson Crusoe. 

What Manchester is to the cotton trade, Bradford and Leeds are 
to the woollen trade. These towns lie in the great County of York, 
beside which nestles little Lancaster, indented and busy as New 
England, while York well compares with New York State. In this 
county is the beautiful Vale of York, the finest stretch of land in 
England. Wolds and moors are features of this county. This is 



BRITISH PROVINCES AND PROVINCIAL CITIES. 299 

the county of Ivanhoe and Robin Hood, as is New York of Leather- 
stocking and Rip Van Winkle. York City used to be the rival of 
London in social and aristocratic attractions. Yorkshire is the Penn- 
sylvania as well as the New York of England, being full of coal and 
iron, lead, jet, alum, and marble, and its agriculture and manufac- 
tures are equally celebrated. In this count}' are the great towns of 
Sheffield, noted for its steel, Bradford, for its worsteds, and Leeds, 
famed for its cloth. York is the greatest of woollen countries. There 
are in the coal field of Yorkshire and its two adjoining counties, 
Nottingham and Derb}', five hundred and forty-one mines, producing 
twelve and a half million tons of coal a year. The Flemish intro- 
duced the woollen trade here. The Yorkshire sea-coast is bold and 
noble, and wrapped in bracing atmospheres ; in the inland west of the 
county are mountains high as the Alleghanies. Everybody knows 
the character of Yorkshire hams and rams. 

According to the census made in 1861, Yorkshire contained nearly 
two millions of acres more than either Lincolnshire or Devonshire, 
the next largest English counties. It is half as large as Holland, 
and about the size of the Peloponnesus of Greece ; it contains five 
thousand nine hundred and sixty-one square miles, and two million 
and fifteen thousand five hundred and forty-one people. 

We have no places for woollen work which compete with Leeds and 
Bradford ; New England manufactures more woollen goods than either 
Philadelphia or New York, which two take the next rank. Philadel- 
phia has probably more money invested in the woollen trade than any 
other American city. 

Bradford contains nearly one hundred and twenty thousand people, 
and received its first steam-engine in the year 1800 ; from this town 
come to America iron plates, bars, railway tires, and cannons ; every 
rill for miles around is dammed up to supply the water, and every 
drop is economized. 

The staple manufactures of Bradford are worsted stuffs and 
mixed worsted, alpaca and mohair, and also cotton and silk fabrics. 
There are not less than one hundred and twenty mills in the 
parish for spinning and weaving worsted, etc. Broad and narrow 
cloths (employing six extensive mills), wool-cards, and ivory and 
horn combs are made in great quantities, and in the town and 
vicinity are extensive dye-works. The cotton manufactures are of 
recent introduction, but are making rapid progress. The neighbor- 
hood abounds in coal, and about three miles south-east are the Low- 



300 THE ISTEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

moor iron works, and a mile east the Bowling iron works, both of 
which are on a very extensive scale. 

The position of Leeds in a coal district, and having ample means 
of communication with both seas and with numerous great seats of. 
commerce, have been the sources of its eminence as a seat of manu- 
factures. Its principal woollen fabrics consist of the finest broad- 
cloth, kerseys, swandowns, and beavers ; it makes also carpets, blan- 
kets, camlets, and shalloons, and large quantities of unfinished stuffs 
are brought from Bradford and Llalifax to Leeds to be finished. 
Linen, yarn, canvas, sacking, and linen cloth are the chief flaxen 
goods produced. Besides the above enumerated branches, Leeds has 
also extensive factories for locomotives, machinery, and tools, chemi- 
cal works, glass houses, potteries, tobacco mills, and soap works. It 
is connected with the North Sea by the Aire and Calder navigation, 
and with the Irish Sea by the Leeds and Liverpool Canal. 

There are many other secondary cities of note in England, but it 
would-be tedious to consider them all. Sheffield is suggested to us, 
however, whenever we take up our knife at dinner. The cutlery 
of all kinds made at Sheffield has long been famous as among the 
best in the world. Other important manufactures are heavy iron 
and steel goods, plated wares, fine metallic instruments, printing 
types, forks, files, and steel. Coal is abundant, and some is mined 
in the vicinity. The Don is navigable, and the canal basin is avail- 
able for vessels of fifty tons. The mass of American cutlery is made 
in Connecticut, and at Rochester, Pennsylvania, penknives are made 
that rank with Sheffield. 

Our manufactures, indeed, are slowly, but undoubtedly catching up 
to England's, protected by partial legislation ; but our shipping, that 
was endeared to us by American hardihood and triumph, has well- 
nigh given up the ocean. We may be said to have a navy which is 
without a commerce to protect. 

In 1860, all the United States manufactured one hundred and fif- 
teen millions of dollars' worth of cotton goods ; while England ex- 
ported more than three times this value in 1866, besides the enormous 
quantity of cotton goods consumed by her thirty millions at home. 

The United States manufactured less than seventy millions of dol- 
lars' worth of woollen goods in 1860 ; while England exported alone 
nearly one hundred and nine millions of dollars' worth in 1866. 

England exported in 1866, seventy-four millions of dollars' worth 
of iron and steel ; in 1860 the United States manufactured nearly 



BRITISH PROVINCES AND PROVINCIAL CITIES. 301 

double this amount. In all the above figures it must be remembered 
that the whole manufacture of America is given, and only the export 
manufacture for the Uuited Kingdom. 

In 1866, England produced one hundred and two millions of tons 
of coal ; in I860, the United States produced more than nineteen 
millions of tons. England exports nearly ten millions of tons of 
coal every year, or more than half the quantity we mine. 

Apprehensions exist that the coal of England will not last till the 
end of the next century ; the American coal-field is well-nigh inex- 
haustible. The magnificent deposit of anthracite coal in the Ameri- 
can Middle States, which saves the clear skies of our Atlantic cities, 
is almost unknown in England. Coal in America at the pit's mouth 
costs nearly the same as in England, but our freights and distances are 
far greater. Cheap transit is one of the most involved and pressing 
problems for our nation. 

Scotland may be said to have two distinct metropolises : Edin- 
burgh, which is the literary, social, and art metropolis, with a popu- 
lation of about one hundred and seventy thousand, and Glasgow, the 
commercial metropolis, with a population of four hundred thousand. 
These two cities lie nearly opposite each other. Edinburgh, near the 
Firth of Forth, — an arm of the North Sea, — and Glasgow, on the 
River Clyde, which receives the tides of the Atlantic. The distance 
between the cities is about fifty miles. Edinburgh is a most beauti- 
ful city, and, like Boston in the United States, it is called the modern 
Athens, as much from the resemblance of its site to that of the capi- 
tal of Attica, as from any supposed conceit that its people resemble 
the Athenians in intellect and civilization. Glasgow lies flat and 
monotonous, though in its environs are some pleasant ranges of 
hills. Edinburgh is a city of antiquities ; like Quebec it has its old 
town and its new town ; its principal street, called High Street, 
passes from the castle, which stands four hundred feet in the air 
upon a rock, to Holyrood Palace, where Mary, Queen of Scots, was 
reproved by John Knox, and where her favorite, Rizzio, was stabbed 
in her presence. In both Edinburgh and Glasgow are beautiful 
monuments of Sir Walter Scott, that in Edinburgh being a Gothic 
edifice, two hundred feet high, with fifty-six statues in its various 
niches, besides the statue of the author and his dog, in the canopy 
below. 

In Edinburgh is the former Parliament House of Scotland, now 
occupied by the Courts of Justice. The hall of the extinct Parlia- 



302 THE ISTEW WOKLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

ment is a splendid apartment, one hundred and twenty-two feet long, 
and forty-nine broad, with an oval roof of sculptured oak. Both 
these Scotch cities have universities, that of Edinburgh having been 
patronized by Oliver Cromwell ; it has thirty-two professors, and 
eight hundred students, and a library of one hundred thousand vol- 
umes. Glasgow University was a dark and gloomy building, in 
Elizabethian architecture. Benjamin Franklin, himself, fixed the 
lightning rod over its cupola. A splendid new university building 
will shortly (1869) be opened in Glasgow, to cost one million and a 
half of dollars. Glasgow has a Cathedral, which is the finest Gothic 
edifice in Scotland ; it is a hundred and fifty-five feet long, or forty- 
two feet shorter than Trinity Church, New York. The River Clyde 
passes through the city of Glasgow, flowing westward, and is crossed 
by fine bridges ; it has twenty feet of water at high tide, but is entirely 
artificial, at Glasgow, having been dredged and excavated. Several 
miles below Glasgow are the great steamship-yards, chief of which is 
that of the Napiers. Glasgow ranks fourth among the export ports of 
the United Kingdom, and Greenock, its main harbor, twenty miles 
down the Clyde, is of more commercial importance than Bristol. 
What Greenock and Port Glasgow are to Glasgow, is Leith to Edin- 
burgh ; it has been the port of the latter old city since the time of 
Robert Bruce ; it contains thirty-four thousand people, has spacious 
docks, and two of its piers are one thousand yards long, each. A 
good sketch of the celebrated fishwomen of Leith may be found in 
Charles Reade's novel of " Christie Johnstone." In Glasgow is bur- 
ied John Knox, the Calvin of Scotland ; in Edinburgh are kept the 
crown jewels of Scotland, the crown itself being old as the days of 
Bruce. Below Glasgow, on the Clyde, is the highest chimney in the 
world, towering above the great chemical works of the Tennants ; it 
is four hundred and thirty-five feet high. The chief streets of Glas- 
gow are Argyle and Buchanan. The streets of both these Scotch 
cities present, after dark, the wretched spectacle of thousands of 
females, drunken, wanton, or destitute, and it is curious, that in this 
kingdom, where the code of religion and morality is written with the 
harshness of Draco, the other extreme of licentiousness can also be 
witnessed to greater excess than even in London or Dublin. Scot- 
land, indeed, is by nature the poorest part of the British Kingdom, 
and far more sterile than Ireland ; the appetites of its people are 
grosser also than those of the Irish ; but the practical intellect, the 
ingenuity, and the industry of the Scotch have made them eminent, 



BRITISH PROVINCES AND PROVINCIAL CITIES. 303 

and influential in English Councils, while the refractory, combative, 
and generous Irish have been well-nigh expatriated. 

Glasgow means the " Dark Glen." Here James Watt made his 
first model of a steam-engine. When Cromwell visited this town, up- 
wards of two hundred years ago, he went to service in the cathedral, 
when the preacher, Zacharie Boyd, denounced him in the most abusive 
terms, so that the Protector's Secretary proposed to have him shot. 
Cromwell replied. " He's a fool, and you're another. Ill pay him 
out in his own fashion." This he did by asking Boyd to dinner, and 
concluding it with a prayer which lasted three hours. 

Edinburgh derived its name from Prince Edwin, of Northumbria, 
who lived in the seventh century, and founded it ; the city was com- 
pletely destroyed in 1544, but after the Reformation, the bigotry of 
the Catholics, the intolerance of Knox and the Reformers, the civil 
feuds amongst the nobles to obtain the Regency, made the town un- 
safe, and it has declined, to be at present of far less mercantile 
importance than Glasgow, its rival. 

Greenock, the chief port of Glasgow, maintains steamship commu- 
nication with New York ; it contains forty-two thousand inhabitants ; 
here James Watt was born, perhaps the greatest benefactor England 
ever had. It is remarkable that the Scottish Parliament refused to 
the last to allow a harbor to be constructed at Greenock, and that the 
English Parliament granted this privilege immediately after the 
union ; hence, arose Glasgow, and that splendid Scottish marine, 
which supplies the great empires of the world. The steamships which 
run from New York to France are all built upon the Clyde. 

Paisley, well known to the ladies who wear its shawls, has risen 
into importance within the past half century, chiefly by imitating the 
fabrics of India, Cashmere, and China ; this town may almost be said 
to be a suburb of Glasgow. North of Edinburgh, on the North Sea, 
are the cities of Dundee, Aberdeen, and Inverness, all old cities. 
Aberdeen furnishes the best granite in Great Britain, — a reddish stone, 
out of which were built the docks of Sebastopol, and many of the 
finest edifices in London. Here, as in almost every city of England 
and Scotland, there is a bran-new statue of Prince Albert, — the 
most prudent and virtuous prince, probably, ever connected with the 
English monarctry. The harbor and pier of Aberdeen cost nearly a 
million and a half of dollars. 

Dundee contains thirty thousand people, — more than Aberdeen. It 
is the third city in Scotland ; it is the principal manufacturing mar- 



304 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

ket of linen, using one hundred and thirty thousand tons of hemp, 
jute, and flax, a year, and running two hundred and three thousand 
spindles ; it also makes one thousand tons of marmalade every year, 
out of sugar, oranges, etc., and one million and a half of jars are 
brought every year from Newcastle, to enclose this luxury. Inver- 
ness is comparatively a small town ; but it is singularly remarkable 
for the beauty of its women, and for the purity in which its people 
speak the English language. Its manufactures are mainly Scotch 
plaids, brooches, stockings, kilts, and fowling-pieces. A large part 
of the business of this town is letting out moors and fishing streams 
for the aristocratic proprietors. Inverness is the city of Macbeth, 
who seems to have been much libelled by Shakespeare, as he was a 
pious and wise chief. 

Perth, situated on the North Sea side of Scotland, inland from 
Dundee, contains the principal penitentiary of Scotland. Ayr, on 
the western coast, about thirty miles below Glasgow, was the home 
of Burns and Wallace. The home of Burns is now a tavern, but 
there are many memorials to his memory close by, amongst which are 
the celebrated figures of u Tarn O'Shanter," and " Souter Johnnie/' 
by James Thorn, who carved " Old Mortality" and his pony, for 
Laurel Hill Cemetery, Philadelphia, who did some fair work for 
Trinity Church, New York, and cut the hideous figure of Washing- 
ton, which disgraces the City Hall Park, New York. 

Perhaps the principal public work of Scotland is the Caledonian 
Canal, which connects the Atlantic and German Oceans, and was 
opened in 1822 ; its total cost was nearly six and a half millions of 
dollars ; it is twenty feet deep, fifty feet broad at the bottom, and 
twenty-three miles long, exclusive of the streams into which it flows, 
at either end; it takes only forty-eight hours to pass through Scot- 
land by this canal. Another great public work is the Crinau Canal, 
nine miles long, which crosses one of the numerous, annoying penin- 
sulas of Scotland. Both of these canals are under government con- 
trol. 

John O'Groat's House was the most northerly habitation in Scot- 
land, and, like Land's End, the most southerly promontory of Great 
Britain ; it has enjoyed considerable notoriety. 

Scotland is noted for its beautiful scenery, and the Highland Rail- 
way affords splendid opportunities to examine the country. The 
finest river steamboat in Europe is the " Iona," which traverses the 
" firths " and sounds of the Scottish coast ; but she bears no com- 



BRITISH PROVINCES AND PROVINCIAL CITIES. 305 

parison with second-rate, or even third-rate, passenger steamboats in 
America. There is not probably a single line of steamers in Europe 
which would please an American, save, possibly the French steamers 
from Marseilles to Italy, and the Orient. One of the pleasures of 
travel in Scotland, and indeed in all Europe, is the excellence and 
thoroughness of the guide-books, — a department of literature which 
has scarcely had its beginning in America. The smallest and most 
insignificant county in England has been more perfectly delineated 
than the cities of New York and of Washington. An American 
travelling over thousands of miles of country is unable to learn 
anything whatever of the towns which he passes. Scottish live 
stock is tolerably well known to Americans, particularly the Clydes- 
dale horses, and the cattle of Fife and Aberdeen. There are six 
millions of sheep in Scotland. Every American child is familiar with 
the Shetland pony. 

Scottish manufactures rival those of York and Lancashire. There 
are thirty-one ship-building yards on the Clyde, from which came in 
1863, a hundred and seventy steamers, representing one hundred and 
twenty-four thousand tons. Enormous quantities of fish are caught 
on the Scottish coast, the value of which in 1867 alone amounted to 
nearly two and a quarter millions of dollars. The manufacture of 
snuff-boxes is quite a feature of Scottish industry, and furnishes a 
curious clue to British habits. There are one hundred and ninety 
flax factories in Scotland, and a hundred and seventy cotton factories, 
running altogether nearly two millions of spindles. 

The country is richly endowed with coal and iron. The Scotch in 
modern times have been the most remarkable people of Europe. Not 
a nation, but only a provincial kingdom, and with an almost sterile 
territory, they have yet a literature comparable with any land's, an 
independent character, and a national faith, and they are recognized 
throughout the world by their philanthropic discoveries and applica- 
tions. They build the cheapest and best steamships ; they make 
splendid sailors, and steadfast soldiers ; their business talents are of 
the shrewdest sort, and if, as Doctor Johnson said, " a Scotchman's 
best prospect was the highway to England," England may be glad 
that the Scotchman took that road. No nobler intellectual statures 
ever walked any path than Robert Burns, James Watt, John Napier, 
Walter Scott, and William Hamilton. 

Yet the condition of the lower orders of Scotch is in many places 
terrible. Drink and poverty are the sources of their grief, and the 
39 



306 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 



most startling crime in British history is attributable to Scotland, — 
that of Burke and Hare, who killed human beings by wholesale to 
sell their carcasses to the surgeons. Scarcely lesfl^errible than 
crime in Great Britain is justice. In no country arSpiriishments 
so merciless and speedy, and until 1869 all executions took place in 
sight of the people on the open pavements. 

At the execution of Burke, at Edinburgh, in January, 1829, the 
spectacle of popular rage and vindictive exultation was fearful. 
Shouts arose from a multitude, vast beyond precedent,- — shouts to 
the executioner of " Burke him ! give him no rope ! Burke him ! " 
and at every convulsive throe, a huzza was set up, as if every one 
present was near of kin to his victims. When the body was cut 
down, there was a cry for "one cheer more ! " and a general and 
tremendous huzza closed the diabolical celebration. 

The early history of Scotland was as tumultuous and unpromising 
as that of Ireland, and the country was only pacified when the Scotch 
Parliament was transferred to London, and the weak race of Scottish 
Kings passed to England, to annoy the people there for more than a 
centuiy. Scotland has never contested British domination like Ire- 
land, but neither Irish nor Scotch are considered by Englishmen to 
rank with themselves ; England is the kingdom to which both defer. 
It is the richer, the more populous, the more eminent in literature 
and achievements. More than all, it is the kingdom of the lan- 
guage. 

The railway system of Great Britain, which connects the pro- 
vincial cities, deserves some mention here. It is not comparable to 
ours for length of rail, but it is a cheaper and more beneficent system, 
in that it does the work of England more thoroughly than our rail- 
ways ; that its companies are not corrupting monopolies like ours, 
and that they are more under the control of the central legisla- 
ture. 

There were two railway gauges in England for a long time ; but 
the narrow gauge finally triumphed as in this country ; the Great 
Western Railway in England is the principal broad-gauge road, like 
the Erie, and Atlantic and Great Western, in America. As long ago 
as 1845, Richard Cobden moved in Parliament to adopt the broad to 
the narrow gauge throughout England, but without success. At the 
present time both England and America, therefore, are troubled with the 
conflicting arrangements of two entirely different series of railways, 
whose cars cannot be transferred either in commercial or military 



BRITISH PROVINCES AND PROVINCIAL CITIES. 307 

necessities. The long saloon car is unknown in England, the cars 
being " carriages" there, with doors in the sides, and half the people 
ride backward. The cars are classified, and one pays according to 
his pride or comfort. 

In 1833-4 there was but one railway in England, running from 
Liverpool to Manchester, and a short one of seven miles in Scotland. 
Ten years later, railways were extended into almost every part of the 
kingdom, and speculation ran high. Americans familiar with the 
gigantic lobbying schemes of railway projectors during the construc- 
tion of the Pacific Railroad can appreciate this account of the same 
excitement in England. The journals of 1844 tell us that three hun- 
dred and thirty -two new railway schemes were proposed before the 
month of October in that year, involving a capital of 1,354,750,000 
dollars, and for which upwards of 115,000,000 dollars would have to 
be deposited before an act of incorporation could be applied for. A 
multitude of other schemes were in an incipient state ; and there 
were sixty-six foreign railway projects in the English market. It 
w r as believed that altogether the number of printed plans and charts 
which would be brought to the door of the Board of Trade, by the 
expiration of the closing-day, would be eight hundred and fifteen. 
The number which succeeded in obtaining admission was above six 
hundred. The closing-day was the 30th of November. " As the 
summer closed and the autumn wore on, the most desperate efforts 
were made," says Miss Martineau, " to get ready these plans. One 
lithographic printer brought over four hundred lithographers from 
Belgium, and yet could not get his engagements fulfilled. The 
draughtsmen and printers in the lithographic establishments lived 
there, snatching two or three hours' sleep on the floor or on benches, 
and then going dizzily to work again. Much work was executed im- 
perfectly, and much was thrown over altogether. Horses were hired 
at great cost, and kept under lock and key, to bring to town at the 
last moment plans prepared in the country Express trains were 
engaged for the same purpose ; and there were cases in which rail- 
way directors refused such accommodation to rival projectors." 

Meanwhile the British country gentlemen had no good opinion of 
the noisy innovation, and there are people in England to this day 
who look upon the railway system as a calamity. They love to 
remember the old Tory days of ignorance, contentment, and repose, 
when only " gentlemen" talked politics, and Manchester was a 
market town. 



308 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

In those early days of the railway, land-owners were groaning 
over the spoliation of their estates, for which no pecuniary award 
could be any compensation. Their park walls were cut through, 
their " dingles and bosky dells " were cut through, and their choicest 
turf, and their secluded flower-gardens. A serious conflict took 
place on one occasion, in Lord Harborough's park in Leicestershire, 
between his lordship's tenantry and the railway surveyors, with the 
force they assembled. Railways were to run, not only along the 
southern margin of the island, and round the bases of the misty 
Scottish mountains, but through the vale on which Furness Abbey 
had hitherto stood shrouded, and among old cathedrals, of which the 
traveller might soon see half a dozen in a day. It was on Easter- 
Monday, 1844, that excursion-trips with return-tickets were first 
heard of. Here began the benefits of cheap pleasure-journeys to the 
hard workers of the nation. The fares were much lowered ; yet the 
extra receipts on the Dover line for three days were three thousand 
five hundred dollars, and on the Brighton line nine thousand seven 
hundred and fifteen dollars. " The process had begun from which in- 
calculable blessings were to accrue to the mind, morals, and manners 
of the nation. From this time, the exclusive class was to meet the 
humbler classes face to face." 

The excursion sj^stem has not been carried to a like perfection in 
America, and our ordinary railway fare, with no better accommoda- 
tion than the English second-class, is thirty per cent, dearer. 

The fastest trains in England carry the Holyhead and Dublin mails, 
and go a mile a minute, including stoppages. They are subsidized 
with large sums of money by government. Our best railway speed 
is thirty miles an hour, and our rolling stock is more cumbrous and 
expensive than abroad. 

To cross from Wales to Dublin, Ireland, takes four hours ; for 
every minute behind time, the postal authorities fine the steamboat 
company seven dollars, except in cases of fog. This line of steamers 
is the finest in the waters of Great Britain, but they do not bear com- 
parison with our Hudson River and Sound steamers. It is three 
hundred and thirty miles from London to Dublin, and it takes ten 
hours to accomplish the journey. 

The Irish coast is most beautiful to look upon after quitting the 
smok}^ and hazy shores of England, and no one who has seen the 
glorious groups of mountains which environ Dublin wonders that the 
Irish love their beautiful island. Kingstown is the port of Dublin, 



BRITISH PROVINCES AND PROVINCIAL CITIES. 309 

as Queenstown is of Cork. Kingstown harbor embraces two hundred 
and fifty-one acres, and Parliament advanced two and a half millions 
of dollars toward improving it. Dublin is six miles distant, and two 
and a half millions of passengers pass over the connecting railway 
every } T ear. The city of Dublin contains about two hundred and 
fifty thousand inhabitants, considerably less than Baltimore. It lies 
id the midst of most noble scenery, the mountains forming vistas for 
many of its streets, and the little River Liffey passes through it, and 
is crossed by many bridges. It is melancholy to enter the ancient 
Parliament House of Ireland, now a grand bank, and many an Irish- 
man has had such musings in its deserted House of Lords, as Gibbon 
while sitting on the Capitoline Hill at Rome. Most of the public 
buildings of Dublin suggest the Englishman's domination. The bank 
of Ireland cost half a million of dollars ; the Four Courts cost one 
million of dollars. Overhanging the town is the castle, where the 
Lord Lieutenant lives. It is to Ireland what the Moro Castle is to 
Cuba, and thence issue all the orders to the military and police. 
The Lord Lieutenant is almost a sovereign, and here he holds court 
in grand style. No seat of learning in the world can boast a longer 
roll of great alumni than Trinity College of Dublin, which covers 
thirty acres of ground, and was founded by Queen Elizabeth. Its 
library contains most noted manuscripts, and in its museum is the 
genuine harp of Brian Boroimhe, which is nearly a thousand years 
old ; there is a Catholic University in Dublin also. Dublin contains 
monuments to Nelson and Wellington, who are perpetuated in almost 
every city of Great Britain and her colonies. Nelson's Pillar is a 
hundred and thirty-four feet high ; the Duke of Wellington's Obelisk 
is two hundred and thirty-five feet high. 

Every citizen of Dublin boasts as much about the Phoenix Park, 
as a New Yorker about the Central. The Phoenix Park is more than 
twice as large as the Central Park, a fact which seems to be forgotten 
by New Yorkers, when they claim to have the largest park extant. 
The Central Park contains eight hundred and forty-three acres ; the 
Phoenix Park seventeen hundred and fifty-nine acres. The Lord 
Lieutenant of Ireland has a residence in the Phoenix Park, but the 
New York Park, in its architectural adornments, is altogether superior 
to its Irish rival. 

Amongst the monuments of Dublin is one to O'Connell, erected in 
1869. There are two Protestant cathedrals in Dublin, Christ Church 
and St. Patrick, the latter having been almost entirely restored by 



i 



310 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

the brewer Guinness. Dublin contains many institutions of learning, 
and beneficence. The word Dublin means, the Blackwater. The 
scenery in the neighborhood of this beautiful cit} r is comparable to 
any in the world, and the names of many of the neighboring locali- 
ties are more beautiful than those of our American Indians. But 
everywhere some memento is visible of the conquest and resistance 
of the Celt to the Saxon : military roads scaling the mountain heights, 
barracks of soldiery, multitudes of spies. In eveiy Irishman's heart, 
the capital ot^ his empire is not London, but Washington. Americans 
know Dublin for its porter, as much as for almost any other product. 
London is thought to produce the best brown stout, Dublin the best 
porter, and Burton, Nottingham, and Edinburgh, the best ale. 

Belfast is a sprightlier city than Dublin, with about half tiie popu- 
lation. The name of the town means, the mouth of the ford. It lies 
at the base of a tall, steep ridge of hills, the highest of which reaches 
the altitude of one thousand one hundred and fifty-eight feet. Its 
harbor is called Belfast Slough, and is an exceedingly fine one, with 
twenty-three feet of water at high tide ; about seven thousand vessels 
enter and clear from this important harbor every year ; the value of 
its exports is forty-five millions of dollars, and its customs duties 
amount to nearly two millions of dollars. In Belfast, and throughout 
the north of Ireland, the working of patterns on muslin, with the 
needle, employs as many as three hundred thousand persons ; but the 
great trade of this important city is in linens. The largest flax-mill 
in the world is that of the Messrs. Mulholland ; it gives employ- 
ment to about twenty-five thousand persons, which is probably the 
greatest number employed by any private firm in Christendom. 
Sixty-five millions of yards of linen are exported from Belfast, annu- 
ally, and three millions of pounds of yarns and threads. Flax yields 
from thirt} r to thirty-live "stones" per acre, and there were nearly 
one hundred and fifty thousand acres of it under cultivation in 1861. 
In all Ireland there are less than a hundred spinning-mills, and about 
seven hundred thousand spindles. Flax is to Ireland, indeed, what cot- 
ton and corn are to America, and it is probable that before long two- 
thirds of that great island will be given up to its cultivation. Not 
only is Belfast noted for its commerce and its flax manufactures, but 
many important branches of manufacture and chemistry are developed 
here, — in particular, the making of starch. From this neighborhood 
come some of the hardiest elements of population in America. In 
Belfast and Derry originated such families as those of Alexander 



BRITISH PROVINCES AND PROVINCIAL CITIES. 311 

T. Stewart, of New York, George H. Stuart, of Philadelphia, and 
John W. Garrett, of Baltimore ; the first, our prince of commerce, 
the second of philanthropy, and the third of railway enterprise. As 
an instance of Belfast enterprise, I may mention that, in 18G7,Ifound 
in Cincinnati, one of the largest pork-packing establishments, under 
the management of a Belfast firm of merchants ; they came out an- 
nually, packed their pork, and shipped it home to Ireland, and 
although during that year they lost eighty thousand dollars, they 
were back again the ensuing winter, as cheerful as ever. What are 
called in America the Scotch Irishmen were originally Protestant 
Irish, who emigrated from the north of Ireland to Scotland, which 
lies across the North Channel, no more than forty miles from Belfast, 
and returned again after the religious feuds had subsided. Except 
as regards " society" and politics, Belfast takes precedence of Dub- 
lin. Here, however, the most bigoted intolerance prevails amongst 
both Catholics and Protestants. It is noted for the number of its 
Orangemen, so called for William, Prince of Orange, who drove the 
last Catholic King of England from his throne. Orangemen in the 
United States take the name of the American Protestant Association. 

Cork, in the south of Ireland, is the city which will be forever asso- 
ciated with the expatriation and griefs of hundreds of thousands of 
Irish Americans. Whatever interest ma}' attach to Plymouth Rock, 
to Jamestown, to St. Mary's, Cork will ever be the fond and lingering 
thought of the more recent millions of American citizens, whose par- 
ents, or who themselves, took passage from this port, for the New 
World, many of them never to see their native land again ; many 
never to see land at all, but to die at sea, bequeathing their children 
to the new continent they struggled so hard to reach. Cork is in 
some respects a handsome city, in others, very dirty ; it has about 
eighty thousand inhabitants, the population of Buffalo, and its sur- 
rounding scenery is very beautiful ; there are but seven feet of water 
at Cork, at low tide, and the Cunard steamers, and others, which 
trade to America, stop at Queenstown, ten miles distant, a noble 
harbor, whose splendid sceneries are disgraced by the great convict 
prison on which they look, and where eight hundred political prison- 
ers, and criminals, toil together, adjudged by a Christian nation to a 
common penalty. The chief exports of Cork are emigrants and but- 
ter. 

About midway between Cork and Dublin are Waterford and Wex- 
ford, two important towns, at the latter of which is an exceedingly 



i 



312 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

bad bridge, built by Lemuel Cox, an American bridge-builder. ¥a- 
terford has one of the finest harbors in the United Kingdom. 

There are many towns in the interior of Ireland whose mention 
would be familiar to the reader, but their importance exists rather in 
the fond memory of the immigrant, than in any respect pertinent to 
our theme. For example, there is Limerick, on the Shannon, which 
has about the population of Syracuse. Limerick has nineteen feet of 
water at high tide, and ought to have been a great American port 
but Galway and Cork have superseded it ; fish-hooks and lace are 
the characteristic manufactures here. 

Galway is a town that at one time bade fair to be the great port 
of the British Islands in American trade. Over one of the gates of 
the town stood, until recently, the following inscription, which might 
be appropriately set over the gates of New York : — 

* " From the ferocious O'Flahertys, 

' * *' Good Lord, deliver us," 

Galway is said to be the ancestral place of the great Lynch family, 
many thousands of whom are in America ; in the thirteenth century 
they came to Ireland, from Linz, in Austria, where, by their bravery, 
they won the privilege of taking a lynx for the crest of their coat- 
of-arms. 

Vessels drawing fourteen feet of water enter Galway, and the 
Adriatic, the fastest ship in the world, built in New York, but now 
owned in England, once crossed the Atlantic, from Galway to St. 
John's, Newfoundland, in little more than four days. 

The last Irish city which we will notice is Londonderry, where the 
steamships from Montreal and Portland touch on their way to Liver- 
pool. The bulk of the town stands more than a hundred feet above 
the River Foyle, which is very wide. Here, also, Mr. Lemuel Cox put 
up a bridge of piles, novel in Europe, at an expense of eighty thou- 
sand dollars ; it proved to be a nuisance, like the Long Bridge at 
Washington, and was taken up some years ago. This town has been 
the theatre of the most miserable and desperate religious wars, and 
its fortifications bear characteristic names, such as " Hangman's 
Bastion," " Coward's Bastion," etc. 

Ireland has beautiful scenery, and hospitable and impulsive people, 
merry if miserable. It has pleasant old ruins of abbeys and castles, 
and these attest that almost all its history has been war, religion, and 



BRITISH PROVINCES AND PROVINCIAL CITIES. 313 

song. It is the only musical part of the British Empire ; for nature 
seems to have labored so perseveringly upon the Englishman's 
stomach, that she forgot to give him an ear ; his throat, however, 
is powerfully, if not delicately, constructed. The lyrists of the 
British Empire have been Moore, — Irish, — and Campbell and Burns, 
— Scotch. The Englishman is the solid and epic personage, and in 
every variety of life is self-contained and individual, — in Milton and 
Shakespeare, as in the commonest cockney, clinging to his own ap- 
petites, opinions, and selfishnesses, a kingdom in himself. " My 
mind to me a kingdom is," sa}- s the British poet ; and there he struck 
the great kev of observation. Solid, beefy, of strong brew is the 
Englishman. Behold all things created for his use ! Not of the 
Roman race, he is in many things more Roman than his Celtic neigh- 
bors. In haughty power of intellect and force he surveys the world, 
and compels or a.dvises it to his own model. 

It is fortunate for America that the controlling element of her 
national character is derived from this strong-stomached stock, and 
it makes the nucleus of all other races here, though all are valuable 
in compounding with it. Wherever any other race than the Anglo- 
Saxon constitutes a local majority in America, there is some defect, 
either of stupidity, socialism, or corruption. 

" Ten years ago," says Dilke, u the third and fourth cities of the 
w r orld, New York and Philadelphia, were as English as our London ; 
the one is Irish now ; the other all but German. Not that the 
Quaker City will remain Teutonic. The Germans, too, are going 
out upon the land ; the Irish alone pour in unceasingly. All great 
American towns will soon be Celtic, while the country continues 
English ; a fierce and easily-roused people will throng the cities, 
while the law-abiding Saxons who till the land will cease to rule it. 
Our relations with America are matters of small moment by the side 
of the one great question : Who are the Americans to be ? " 

This quotation indicates the shrewdness, and the mistake by its 
very shrewdness, of the British intellect in observation. The history 
of the American (so to speak) race is, that the first or second 
generation holds to the towns, and the second or third rambles 
toward the frontiers. Every race alike becomes restless here. The 
native American is the tarantula ; whom he bites must dance. We 
are a race of town-makers. The most contented father has the most 
restless child ; a mighty impulse animates us all, — to go somewhere, 
to begin something ! What we have begun our European accessions 
40 



314 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

finish, but all that we do is on the basis of democracy. The repub- 
lic is not a name with us, as with the French ; it is a great permeat- 
ing fact. The Englishman's mind is a kingdom, indeed ; the Amer- 
ican's is a republic. 

Another distinction of the English character which we have 
retained is the love for municipal or local self-government. The 
perversion of municipal institutions to political ends has occasioned 
the sacrifice of local interests to party purposes, which have been 
frequently pursued through the corruption and demoralization of the 
electoral bodies This was the language of the Commission on 
English Municipal Reform : " In conclusion," they say, " we report 
that there prevails among the inhabitants of a great majority of the 
incorporated towns of Great Britain a general, and, in our opinion, 
a just, dissatisfaction with their municipal institutions, a distrust of 
the self-elected municipal councils, whose powers are subjected to no 
popular control, and whose acts and proceedings, being secret, are 
unchecked by the influence of public opinion ; a distrust of the 
municipal magistracy, tainting with suspicion the local administra- 
tion of justice, and often accompanied with contempt of the persons 
by whom the law is administered ; a discontent under the burdens 
of local taxation ; while revenues that ought to be applied for the 
public advantage are diverted from their legitimate use, and are 
sometimes wastefully bestowed for the benefit of individuals, some- 
times squandered for purposes injurious to the character and morals 
of the people. We, therefore, feel it to be our duty to represent to 
your Majesty, that the existing municipal corporations of England 
and Wales neither possess nor deserve the confidence and respect of 
your Majesty's subjects ; and that a thorough reform must be effected 
before they can become what we submit they ought to be, useful and 
efficient instruments of local government." 

Upon this proposition the old Saxon idea of local self-government 
was adjusted so as to purify the cities, and the remarks of the 
British historian are indices of the strange form of government which 
prevailed almost down to our time. 

"It was a great thing," says Miss Martineau, " to see our country 
planted over with little republics, where the citizens would hence- 
forth be trained to political thought and public virtue ; but it seemed 
a pity that the city feasts must go, the processions be seen no 
more, the gorgeous dresses be laid by, the banners be folded up, 
the dragon be shelved, and St. George never allowed to wear his 



BRITISH PROVINCES AND PROVINCIAL CITIES. 315 

armor again ; and the gay runners, in their pink and blue jerkins, 
their peaked shoes and rosettes, and their fearful wooden swords, 
turned into mere weavers, tinmen, and shoemakers. Already some 
of us may find ourselves discoursing eagerly to children, as English- 
men used to do to wondering Americans, of the sights we once saw 
on great corporation days." 

Since the American civil war the tide has set strongly toward gov- 
erning every part of the United States by one absolute Legislature, 
and a central Executive. This is not Anglo-Saxon freedom, which 
in an essential degree consists of local government, with a central 
directory. The continental nations, and notably France, tried the 
contrary, and made a dismal end. " The republic, one and indivisi- 
ble," was only another form of saying, " a strong central govern- 
ment," and municipal and local institutions perished under the iron 
hand of the one absolute Legislature. The hardest thing to capture 
is an archipelago, because tyranny must divide to do it ; so a repub- 
lic should have many centres, with one Providence watching over 
all. 

There is no space in this chapter to describe the internal life of 
English communities ; that will be touched upon in the chapter upon 
the " Influence of Government on the People." The essential feature 
of English cities is repose ; of American cities, action. 

" It is not impossible," says a French critic, " to conceive the sur- 
passing liberty which the Americans enjoy ; some idea may likewise 
be formed of the extreme equality which subsists amongst them ; but 
the political activity which pervades the United States must be seen 
in order to be understood. No sooner do you set foot upon the 
American soil than you are stunned by a kind of tumult ; a confused 
clamor is heard on every side ; and a thousand simultaneous voices 
demand the immediate satisfaction of their social wants. Every- 
thing is in motion around you ; here, the people of one quarter of a 
town are met to decide upon the building of a church ; there, the 
election of a representative is going on ; a little further, the delegates 
of a district are posting to the town, in .order to consult upon some 
local improvements ; or in another place the laborers of a village 
quit their ploughs to deliberate upon the project of a road or a pub- 
lic school. Meetings are called for the sole purpose of declaring 
their disapprobation of the line of conduct pursued by the govern- 
ment ; whilst in other assemblies the citizens salute the authorities of 
the day as the fathers of their country. Societies are formed which 



i 



316 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

regard drunkenness as the principal cause of the evils under which 
the state labors, and which solemnly bind themselves to give a con- 
stant example of temperance." 

It might be well if there was more concern upon the question of 
temperance in England ; for the vice of all the British Islands is the 
abuse of the stomach and the brain, over-eating and over-drinking. 
We might be said to be a nation of u gulpers," in that we eat too 
fast ; but the British are a nation of guzzlers and gluttons, in that 
they eat too much. 




NATIONAL WORKS. 

1— Suspension Bridge at Niagara. 2— The Victoria Tubular Bridge. Montreal. 3— Pont 

Neuf, Paris. 4— Chicago Hirer Tunnel. 5— 3Ienai Bridge, Wales. 



CHAPTER XII. 

BRITISH COLONIES AND AMERICAN TERRITORIES. 

An examination of the British possessions and their relative value as compared with the 
unorganized and territorial parts of the United States. — Treatment of the natives of 
India and of the American Indians. — Mr. Seward's purchases of Alaska and St. 
Thomas. — The conquests of England and America from the Spanish. 

In this chapter there will be little reference to Australia or to 
Canada, which will be specially treated in the latter part of the book. 
Their interests enter into immediate rivalry with ours, and are so 
vigorous and large that they cannot well be considered within the 
limits of the present examination. 

The British possessions may be divided into three classes : Euro- 
pean, Asiatic and African, American and Australian. By her 
European possessions, England is put into close relation with conti- 
nental politics. By her Oriental possessions she measures her civili- 
zation with that of antiquity. By her acquisitions in the new worlds 
of America and Australasia, she becomes mutual or rival pioneer 
with the United States. 

If we could express the surface of the globe by a flat plain, with 
the United Kingdom at its centre, the latter would seem to be a tiny 
fruticose cluster of islands, clipped from the jagged vine of Europe. 
Three great colonial appendages would be at once manifest : India, 
to her south-east ; British America, due west ; and Australia, upon 
the extended line of India, and twice the distance of the other two. 
For the rest of her possessions, scattered about the globe, they would 
separately seem as tiny as her parent self. 

The table hereto appended exhibits in concentrated form the 
Colonial Empire of this mighty kingdom, by which it will be seen 
that the destiny of England is to colonize the world, as our separate 
American destiny has been to give liberal institutions to the western 
hemisphere. 

317 



318 



THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 



POSSESSIONS. 



India. 



North American : 
Canada 



New Brunswick "| 

Nova Scotia ! 

Prince Edw'd Island, f 

Newfoundland J 

British Columbia and j 
Vancouver Island \ 

Total North American 
Colonies 



Bermuda. . 
Honduras. 



West Indies: 



Bahamas 

Turks Islands... 

Jamaica 

Virgin Islands.. 
St. Christopher. 

Nevis 

Antigua 

Montserrat 

Dominica 

St. Lucia 

St. Vincent 

Barbadoes 

Grenada 

Tobago 

Trinidad 

British Guiana. . 



Total, West Indies. 
Falkland Islands... 



Australasia : 

New South Wales.. 

Victoria 

South Australia.. . . 
Western Australia. 

Tasmania 

New Zealand 

Queensland 



Total of Australasia. 



Hong Kong 

Labuan 

Ceylon 

Mauritius 

Natal 

Cape of Good Hope... 

St. Helena 

Gold Coast 



Date and Mode 
of 

Acquisition. 



Capitulation. 

and 
Cession 



..1759 
.1763 



Settlement., 
Settlement., 



.1497 



Settlement.. 
Cession.... 



.1609 
.1670 



Settlement . . 
t< 

Capitulation.. 



.1629 
.1629 
. 1055 



Settlement.. 



Cession 

Capitulation.. 

Cession 

Settlement... 



Cession 

Capitulation.. 



.1628 
.1632 
.1632 
.1763 
. 1803 
.1763 
.1005 
.1605 
.1703 
.1797 
.1803 



Cession 183; 



Settlement., 



.1787 
.1836 
.1836 
.1829 
.1803 
.1839 
.1859 



Area. 



Treaty 

Cession 

Capitulation.. 



Settlement... 
Capitulation. 
Settlement. . , 



. 1843 
.1846 
.1796 
.1810 
.1838 
.1806 
.1651 
.1661 



Sq. miles. 



956,436 



331,280 

27,027 

18,671 

2,173 

40,200 

213,000 



632,361 



24 



13,500 



3,021 

6,400 

57 

103 

50 

183 

47 

291 

250 

131 

166 

133 

97 

1,754 

76,000 



88,683 



7,600 



323,437 

86,831 
383,328 
978,000 

26,215 
106,259 
678,000 



2,582,070 



29 
45 

24,700 

708 

14,397 

104,931 

47 

6,000 



Population 



Number. 



144,948,356 



2,881,862 

252,047 

330,857 

84,386 

122,638 

29,671 



3,701,461 



11,451 



25,63, 



35,487 

4,372 
441,264 

6,051 
24,440 

9,822 
37,125 

7,645 
25,666 
29,444 
31,755 
152,757 
36,955 
15,410 
84,438 
155,026 



1,097,627 



648 



411,388 
626,639 
156,605 
20,200 
95,201 
201,712 
87,775 



1,599,580 



125,504 

3,345 

2,049,881 

322,517 

158,580 

267,090 

0,800 

151,346 



Exports 

from 

the British 

Kingdom. 



23,748,180 



Imports 
into Do. 



£4,382,473 

476,600 

1,263,198 

160,131 

429,415 

202,474 



6,917,291 



39,696 



130,426 



417,326 

12,901 

642,785 

77,890 

11,714 

64,999 

834 

21,107 

26,623 

35,817 

366,053 

50,920 

17,990 

4^0,815 

741,493 



2,925,327 



15,040 



4,349,371 

7,147,210 

1,741,691 

100,075 

283,056 

2,606,994 

713,545 



16,941,948 



904,255 

595,402 

309,990 

1,700,574 

59,332 

No returns 



46,873,208 



£3,067,918 

540,552 

152,948 

64,876 

343,678 

10,487 

26,804 



4,207,263 



6,462 



220,077 



1,385,646 

2,547 

723,153 

166,960 
20,536 

176,739 
14,927 
48,910 
98,597 

140,701 

702,318 
97,477 
43,059 

637,816 
1,729,151 



5,988,537 



17,325 



3,319,628 
7,080,332 
964,895 
104,673 
403,559 
1,186,085 
240,550 



13,899,729 



1,153 
2,420,056 
1,311,787 
100,271 
1,908,217 
14,281 
received. 



BRITISH COLONIES AND AMERICAN TERRITORIES. 319 



POSSESSIONS. 


Date and Mode 

of 

Acquisition. 


Area. 


Population. 


Exports 

from 

the British 

Kingdom. 


Imports 
into Do. 




• 

Settlement 1787 

" ....1631 

Capture 1704 

1800 


Sq. miles. 


Number. 


£ 


£ 




4G8 
20 
IS 
115 


41,800 

6,939 

10,643 

143,970 


144,081 

67,915 

No returns 

36.292 


39,433 

_ 29,823 






Malta 


835,946 




Entire British depen- 
dencies 


4,425,327 


154,527,950 


56,575,807 


77,993,568 



The total area of the United States and territories, inclusive of 
Alaska, is upwards of three million five hundred thousand square 
miles, or nearly three-fourths of that of the British colonies. 

The European possessions of Great Britain are more important in 
a naval and military point of view, than by any considerations of 
revenue or dimensions. A few islands in her immediate seas were 
acquired at a very early period of her history. Heligoland, a little 
island two miles and a half in circumference, lies in the North Sea, 
off the mouths of the important German rivers Elbe and Weser ; it 
was captured from Denmark subsequent to the American Revolution, 
during the French wars, and at the peace, in 1814, was ceded to the 
British government. It is a watering-place, with three thousand in- 
habitants, chiefly fishermen and pilots. Gibraltar was wrested from 
Spain, in 1704 ; it contains fifteen thousand inhabitants, has with- 
stood frequent sieges, and has been of the utmost military conse- 
quence since the beginning of modern times ; its possession has 
always been a source of bitterness between England and Spain, and 
many English statesmen are of the opinion that it should be restored. 
The Ionian Islands, which were conquered in the Napoleonic wars, 
were ceded to Greece, a few years ago, with their two hundred and 
thirty thousand people. Malta is even a more important station than 
Gibraltar ; it occupies a central point in the Mediterranean Sea, on 
the great overland highway to India, and has been successively occu- 
pied by all the great nations of antiquity. In the }'ear 1800 the 
English took possession of it, suppressed the Knights of St. John, 
and fortified it in the strongest manner ; it contains about one hundred 
and thirty thousand persons, and is about as large as Staten Island, 
in New York harbor. All these home possessions are administered by 
royal Governors. 

All the foreign colonies of England are called " Provincial Estab- 



320 THE NEW WORLD COMPAEED WITH THE OLD. 

lishments," with the exception of Sierra Leone, in Africa, which is 
an English Liberia, peopled with emancipated negroes, and particu- 
larly with the descendants of those American slaves who joined the 
British army and navy during the American Revolution ; of these, 
four hundred were transported, and ten years later, more than one 
thousand negroes, of the same origin, who had settled in Nova Sco- 
tia, with the white Tories, were sent to Sierra Leone, at their own 
request. This colony, like Liberia, cannot be said to have proved suc- 
cessful ; it is a charter government, specially incorporated like a city, 
or a trading company. The other British colonies, in Africa, are the 
Gold Coast, the Cape of Good Hope, and Natal, besides two islands in 
the South Atlantic, off the African coast, Ascension, and St. Helena. 
The Cape of Good Hope was treacherously seized by the English, in 
1806, when its legitimate Dutch colonists were entirely republican- 
ized, and about to adopt a declaration of independence from Holland, 
after the example of the United States. England has two hundred 
and eighty miles of gold coast in Western Africa, populated by three 
hundred thousand people, and captured from the Dutch one hundred 
years before the American Revolution. The English rule here has 
been of a barbarous character, and on one occasion they put a native 
King to death with more agonizing tortures than Cortez inflicted 
upon the Montezuma ; part of the family of the King of Ashantee 
has been educated in England. In 1868 the King of Abyssinia, 
who was said to be successor of the Queen of Sheba proposed mar- 
riage to Queen Victoria, and no notice being taken of his proposition, 
he imitated the example of Napoleon, and seized, as hostages, all the 
English in his dominion. With the usual decision of the English 
ministry, an army was despatched to Abyssinia, which penetrated to 
the capital of the incensed suitor, killed him, routed his army, and 
brought his son to London to be educated. No positive determina- 
tion has yet been made, as to colonizing Abyssinia by the English, 
for English sentiment in our day is averse to conquering more colonies. 
The above colonies are all administered by royal Governors, ap- 
pointed by the English Cabinet, who convoke legislative assemblies, 
which can enact ordinances not repugnant to the laws of England, 
corresponding in this respect with the power granted by Congress to 
the Territorial Legislatures of the United States. In 1782, after the 
successful revolution of the Americans, an act was passed, entitled 
" Statute George III., c. xii.," which was of the utmost consequence to 
all the colonies of England, and which goes by the name of the " Co- 



BRITISH colonics and amkkkwn TERRITORIES. 321 

lonial Magna Charta." It provides "that the King and Parliament 
of Great Britain will not Impose any duty, tax, or assessment what- 
ever, payable In any of His Majesty's colonics, provinces, or planta- 
tions/ 9 Thus the American revolt was not merely an incidental 
blessing to civilization, but it directly enfranchised the vast posses- 
sions of England, present and future, and made Anglo-Saxon liberty 
a characteristic of all the English colonies. From all the courts of 
the British colonies appeals lie to the Queen in Council, or to the 
Court of Queen's Bench, in London, and as a last resort to the House 
of Lords. None of the acts of the British Parliament are binding 
upon the colonies, unless the latter be specially mentioned. The 
Governor of every colony has the right of pardon, and the privilege 
of nominating to the civil posts. He has his own Cabinet Council, 
which is sometimes a Court of Appeal, but the Bishops and the Im- 
portant Judges are appointed in London. Canada and Jamaica have 
the oldest, Colonial Parliaments amongst the British colonies; the 
constitution of Jamaica is two hundred years old ; the Governor, or 
Captain-General, is also Commander-in-chief, and Vice-Admiral; he 
appoints his Privy Council arbitrarily; the upper legislative house 
consists of certain office-holders, and of members whom the Governor 
appoints for life; the lower house is elective. 
The Governors of nil the British colonies arc appointed for six 

years; the salary of that of .Jamaica is 30,000 dollars a year; of 

Gibraltar, 25,000 dollars; of the Cape of Good Hope, 25,000 dollars; 

and the (Governor of the Little Bermuda Islands, off the American 
coast,, receives three-fifths as much salary as the President of the 

United stat.es; the Governor of Canada received 85,000 dollars be- 
fore the Dominion was organized, and the combined salaries of the 
British Colonial Governors, in North America, were considerably 

above 100,000 dollars a year. 

But the most extraordinary salary paid to any British official is 
that given to the Governor-Genera] of India, namely, 126,000 dollars 

a year, with a grand palace and establishment at Calcutta, and a 

Country residence at Barrack-Pur. 

The British Empire, in India, is an episode in history, which for 

gorgeous romance is not equalled by the story of Cortez, or of Alex- 
ander. Beginning with a little trading company, in the time of 

Queen Elizabeth, it obtained permission to take shelter along the 
shores of the Indian Ocean, and from those paltry settlements has 
grown the conquest of India, the subjection of its dense population, 
41 



322 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

and the mingling of cold English characteristics, with the luxurious 
barbarian splendor of Asiatic despotism. All modern nations, prior 
to the settlement of America, derived their riches from India and 
the East, and the opening up of ocean communication with it, by 
turning the Cape of Good Hope, was esteemed not less remarkable 
than the discovery of America, which immediately preceded. The name 
of Vasco de Gama took rank with that of Columbus, and the great 
Portuguese epic poem was written by Camoens, to celebrate his 
voyage. For a long time the French, the Portuguese, and the English 
contended for precedence in India, and after the death of the last 
Great Mogul, who died at Delhi, in 1707, his mighty empire of the 
Orient fell into anarchy and sloth, and became the prey of Euro- 
pean adventurers. It was during the French and Indian War, in 
which Washington rendered his earliest services to his country, that 
the British General Clive finally wrested Hindostan from French and 
native alike, enriching and ennobling himself to so great a degree 
that he became the victim of jealousy and slander, and committed 
suicide. During the American Revolution, the able and cruel War- 
ren Hastings became the first Governor-General of India, and he, 
also, was made the subject of reproach, and brought to England for 
trial, closing his almost imperial life in mortification and neglect. 
After the American Revolution, Cornwallis, who had surrendered at 
Yorktown, became Governor of India, and he proved one of the 
most amiable and beneficent officials who has ever been sent there. 
Some Americans may be curious to know the subsequent career of 
our old and unfortunate antagonist, and it is nowhere better ex- 
pressed than in Miss Martineau's excellent history : — 

" Cornwallis," she says, " had never approved the American war, 
and had avowed his disapprobation at the peril of his interests ; but he 
did not suffer the less keenly, when his surrender at Yorktown proved 
the death-blow of the English power in America, and caused a change 
of ministry and of measures at home. His virtue, however, his dis- 
interestedness and prudence, appear to have been so unquestionable, 
that he did not suffer politically, or in personal character, for this 
misfortune ; and soon after, he was Governor-General and Comman- 
der-in-chief of Bengal. The war with Tippoo distinguished his ad- 
ministration ; and we see him the host of Tippoo's two sons, the 
hostages put into the hands of this kind-hearted and generous noble- 
man. When the Irish rebellion of 1798 broke out, we find him ap- 
pealed to, to £0 and see what could be done ; and the testimony 



BRITISH COLONIES AND AMERICAN TERRITORIES. 323 

is universal as to his benevolent endeavors to put down violence, 
soften rancor, and rectify injustice on every hand. This was an 
extraordinary life of service and dignity to have been lived by a man 
whose qualifications were his virtues, rather than his talents. Dis- 
interested, moderate, prudent, brave, and benign, he commanded con- 
fidence on every hand." 

Lord Cornwallis had many successors, prominent among whom 
were the Duke of Wellington, before his European renown began, 
and Viscount Canning, who was the Governor-General when the 
celebrated revolt of 1857 broke out. A correspondent of the London 
" Times" visited Governor Canning during this revolt, and his 
recollections of the vice-regal palace may be appropriately inserted 
here : — 

" A residence not altogether unbecoming the Viceroy of India, but 
at the same time by no means overwhelming, splendid, or in faultless 
taste. The general effect is nearly spoiled by a huge dome, perfect- 
ly ' bald/ rising out of the centre of the roof, like a struggling bal- 
loon. 

" Placed in the midst of a large open space, with green lawns, not 
very extensive, but covered with fine, clean-shaven sward, and aque- 
ducts around it ; and almost within an arrow-shot of the Hooghly, 
the Government House should be as cool as any house can be in Cal- 
cutta ; and the great number of windows on the side elevations give 
it an appearance of airiness which the ' sunny side ' by no means 
deserves. If that dome could be removed, or put straight, or some- 
thing be got to sit on it, taking it all and all, as seen from the exterior 
of the fine gateways which lead to the entrance, the Government 
House reflects credit on the engineer's officer who designed and built 
it, at the cost of seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. 

"At the gateways, with nothing more formidable than canes in their 
hands, were real sepoys, — each in ' shape and hue ' so like a British 
soldier when his back is turned, that at a sudden view he would be- 
guile ; tall, broad-backed, stiff-set, but with lighter legs than the 
Briton, and a greater curvature in the thigh. There he is, doing his 
regulation stride, saluting every white man who enters, civilian or 
soldier, dressed after the heart of army tailors, pipe-clayed, and 
cross-belted, and stocked, and winged and facingled, every button 
shining, every strap blazing, and each bit of leather white as snow, 
— the sepoy of whom his officers and those around him, contenting 
themselves with that fair outer show, know as little^ if we believe 



324 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD, 

what we hear, as they do of the Fejee Islanders. They cleaned the 
outside of the platter, and cared little for what was within. Having 
whitened their sepulchre, they were satisfied. But it was not the 
outer portals of the Government House only that were trusted to 
sepoys. At the doorway, at the reception rooms, in the corridors, 
paced up and down the old troopers of the body-guard, dressed some- 
what like our lancers ; tall, white-mustachioed veterans, on whose 
hearts glittered many medals, clasps, and crosses, won in action 
against Sikh and Affghan. I am not sure whether my own feeling of 
mild surprise, that at the Viceroy's palace not a single English 
domestic was visible, would not be shared in by most of my country- 
men. White-turbaned natives, with scarlet and gold ropes fastened 
round the waist, glided about in the halls, and some of the more im- 
portant added to the dignity of their appearance by wearing large 
daggers in their cummerbands. At half-past six o'clock I waited 
upon Lord Canning, whom I found immersed in books and papers, 
and literally surrounded by boxes, labelled ' military/ ' political/ 
4 revenue/ etc., etc." 

The Indian revolt, which shook the British empire in India from 
circumference to centre, is supposed to have been a Mohammedan 
conspiracy, assisted by certain singular superstitions of the Hindoos 
that the Eaj, or reign of the East India Company, was to conclude at 
the end of a hundred years, and it is remarkable that although the 
revolt was suppressed, the hated Raj did cease within the period 
mentioned, for in 1858 the Home Government mustered the East 
India Company out of existence, and succeeded to its vast but costly 
possessions. The real cause of the outbreak, however, was the in- 
troduction of greased Enfield cartridges into the sepoy service ; for, 
precluded by their religion from biting off these cartridges, the 
sepoys became mutinous, and at Meerut, near the great city of Del- 
hi in north-western India, the British officers attempted to punish 
the disobedient heathen ; they revolted on the field of parade, mas- 
sacred the Europeans, and within a few days captured the city of 
Delhi, committing terrible atrocities almost immediately throughout 
the whole of Bengal, and in other provinces a mighty ferment took 
place ; the whites were butchered everywhere ; a general and his 
army surrendered and were put to death, while the British race in 
India and at home was in consternation. General Havelock and Sir 
Colin Campbell raised the siege of Lucknow and relieved Delhi, 
capturing the aged King of the latter city, the heir of the Great Mogul, 



BRITISH COLONIES AND AMERICAN TERRITORIES. 825 

who was sentenced to perpetual banishment, and died in exile in 
1862. At the time of the outbreak there were two hundred and thir- 
ty-two thousand native troops in Bengal, and forty-five thousand 
Europeans ; five years afterward the European troops were doubled, 
and the natives cut down to one-half; the great army of Bengal was 
practically disbanded. 

At that woful period in the history of British colonization hundreds 
of thousands of Englishmen began to doubt that the domination of 
their empire in the Orient was either a glory or a blessing ; yet, so 
costly have been British investments in Hindostan, and so thorough- 
ly are the politics and commerce of England interwoven with it, that 
to break the tie would be almost as dangerous as we believed the ex- 
tinction of slavery by the North. The English debt amassed for India 
alone amounts to 600,000,000 dollars, while 250,000,000 dollars are 
invested in India railways, and 100,000,000 dollars in India banks 
and stocks. The English have built six thousand miles of railroad 
in Hindostan, and eleven thousand miles of telegraph, achievements 
which compare with our Pacific Railway, and overland wires. At the 
present time (1869) there are twenty-four millions of acres of cotton 
under cultivation in India, and the products of that extraordinary 
land are almost representative of every zone ; domesticated in that 
vast territory the elephant is docile as the mule ; the mountains rise 
higher than elsewhere on the globe, eighteen peaks reaching eleva- 
tions of more than twenty thousand feet, and the highest attaining a 
point of more than twenty-eight thousand, nearly five times the 
height of Mount Washington ; almost every description of cereal, 
fruit, and tree, grows on the plains or mountain slopes of Hindostan, 
and the dense population of that subjugated empire is gifted, patient, 
meditative, and laborious, almost beyond example ; their literature is 
older than the Scriptures ; in a far-past age their forefathers were 
active and ambitious, as their legends show, but when they had set- 
tled upon the fertile plains of the Ganges and Hindus they sat them- 
selves down to a long trance of reminiscence, philosophy, and piety ; 
out of which they have not wakened for these two thousand years. 
If the scholarship of Europe be right, the plains of India gave birth 
to the great western races which now dominate the earth ; there we 
learned many of our most practical principles, — the rotation of 
crops, the finer arts of weaving and embroidering, the propagation 
of many plants and trees which now give shade to the nations of the 
earth. The rivers of Hindostan compare with the Mississippi, the 



326 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

Missouri, and the Colorado ; the sacred Ganges is nearly two thou- 
sand miles long, and the Hindus one thousand seven hundred ; the 
former drains five hundred thousand square miles of fruitful land, 
the Hindus four hundred thousand. From the earliest ages the 
muslins of Daeca, the shawls of Cashmere, and silks and tapestries 
of Delhi have been known to Europe ; with them were draped the 
palaces of the Roman Emperors, and down to our day they adorn 
alike the shoulders of the Queen and of the President's wife. An 
American may note how singularly the Hindoo system of Caste re- 
sembles the distribution of labor in our modern manufacturing estab- 
lishments. In India every village is like an American township, — a 
neighborhood rather than a town, each with its head inhabitant, its 
register of real estate, its brahmin or priest, its school-master, 
astrologer, and barber ; and these trades descend from father to son, 
in uninterrupted continuity, till it may be said that for two thousand 
years each family in India has been slowly plodding over the same 
task, until the thought and spirit have departed ; ingenuity there is 
none, only dexterity of hand, and melancholy perseverance ; without 
factories, and with the rudest tools, these mild-eyed natives still pro- 
duce carpets, scarfs, saddles, and weapons of such exquisite perfec- 
tion that they ha> 7 e astonished the eyes of Europeans. In the same 
manner De Tocqueville pointed out the tendency of modern govern- 
ment and manufactures to relieve the citizen of all responsibility, 
and set him to work upon some separate part of machinery, so that 
by long and patient industry his mind ceases to labor, his hands 
grow automatic, and his children follow along in his trade and con- 
dition, — and this is Caste in Hindostan. 

44 In proportion," says this incisive critic, " as the principle of the 
division of labor is more extensively applied, the workman becomes more 
weak, more narrow-minded, and more dependent. The art advances, the 
artisan recedes. On the other hand, in proportion as it becomes more 
manifest that the productions of manufactures are by so much the 
cheaper and better as the manufacture is larger and the amount of capital 
employed more considerable, wealthy and educated men come forward 
to embark in manufactures which were heretofore abandoned to poor 
or ignorant handicraftsmen. The magnitude of the efforts required 
and the importance of the results to be obtained attract them. Thus 
at the very time at which the science of manufactures lowers the 
class of workmen, it raises the class of masters. 

44 The master and the workman have, then, no similarity, and their 



BRITISH COLONIES AND AMERICAN TERRITORIES. 327 

differences increase every day. They are only connected as the two 
rings at the extremities of a long chain. Each of them fills the 
station which is made for him, and out of which he does not get ; 
the one is continually, closely, and necessarily dependent upon the 
other, and seems as much born to obey as that other is to com- 
mand. 

" What is this but aristocrac}^ ? 

" I am of opinion," he concludes, "upon the whole, that the man- 
ufacturing aristocracy which is growing up under our eyes is one of 
the harshest which ever existed in the world ; but at the same time 
it is one of the most confined and least dangerous. Nevertheless 
the friends of democracy should keep their eyes anxiously fixed in 
this direction ; for if ever a permanent inequality of conditions and 
aristocracy again penetrate into the world, it may be predicted that 
this is the channel by which they wilkenter." 

It is over this ancient race of Hindoos, who remind us, in their 
personal graces, gentleness, and beauty, of the race of the 
Incas, that the young and unrelenting Anglo-Saxon has fastened his 
chain. His establishment begins in London under the ostensible 
sceptre of the Queen, where the Secretary of State for India, a poli- 
tician, who has perhaps never visited the Orient at all, receives his 
salary of 25,000 dollars a year, and his under Secretary is paid 
10,000 dollars ; both of them rotate out of office, when there is a 
change of party. But there are, also, two permanent Secretaries 
besides, who do the real work of administration, and the Home Sec- 
retary has a council of fifteen members, each receiving 6000 dollars a 
year. From this small office in London the mind must next pass a 
fourth way round the globe, to where, at Calcutta, the Governor-Gen- 
eral holds the highest office, filled by an uncrowned head, in the 
w r orld, excepting only the American President. He has a Privy 
Council of five members, nominated from London, and when he 
adds several persons of his own selection to these, he makes a Legis- 
lative Council, in which are both Europeans and Hindoos, the former 
predominating. Receiving orders from this great Governor and 
Council, are minor Governors for the great departments of Madras, 
Bombay, and Bengal ; but the ostensible administration throughout 
India is in the hands of the hereditary and despotic Indian princes, 
who are thus upheld in nominal importance, as Cortez and Pizarro 
upheld the Incas they had enslaved, and ruled the enslaved people 
through them. Around these Indian despots are their nobles, and 



328 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

all the gorgeous pageantry of an Eastern Court ; but politicians in 
England are directing the entire government. The civil service of 
India is divided into two parts, of which the covenanted civil service 
is entirely European, and the members have passed examination in 
London ; there are eight hundred of them, with salaries ranging from 
1,500 dollars to 40,000 dollars annually. The uncovenanted civil 
service is composed of Europeans, Eurasians, or half-breeds, and 
natives, more than six thousand in number, some of whom are paid 
as low as 600 dollars a year. There is, besides, a relentless army of spies 
and police employed in exacting taxes from the native population, and 
here we may remark, that whereas land in England has been almost 
exempt from taxation, in subject India the principal revenue is 
derived from it. The article of second importance from which reve- 
nue is derived is opium, which is manufactured by the government, 
and forced upon China and India. If the United States would make 
a monopoly of whiskey, and force the Indians to consume it, we 
should have a government on the plains very much like that of the 
British in Asia. 

Contrast the worst treatment of the savage Indians of our fron- 
tiers with the ordinary behavior of the English to the Hindoos, and 
we shall have reason to be glad that we have not utterly disgraced 
our race and age, whereas, according to a report of Judge Malcolm 
Lewin, of Madras, torture was there, until 1856, an ordinary means 
of government. " Corruption and bribery remained paramount 
throughout the whole establishment ; violence, torture, and cruelty 
are the chief instruments for detecting crime, implicating innocence, 
and extorting money ; exposure to the sun ; putting pepper and 
chillies in the eyes ; searing the breasts with hot irons ; nipping the 
flesh with pincers ; fastening the aggravating poolay insect upon the 
navel, — these w T ere alleged to be a part of the system of government, 
known and acknowledged as an engine for realizing the public 
revenue." 

" When Neill," says Eussell, the " Times " correspondent, 
" marched from Allahabad, his executions were so numerous and 
indiscriminate, that one of the officers attached to his column had to 
remonstrate with him, on the ground that if he depopulated the 
country he could get no supplies for the men." 

Captain Bruce, a British authority, has said more comprehensively 
of British rule in India, that if " our empire in that country were 
overthrown, the only monuments which would remain of us would 



BRITISH COLONIES AND AMERICAN TERRITORIES. 329 

be broken bottles and corks. Along the whole coast our government 
is popular, because the people share in the advantages of a flourish- 
ing trade. But in the interior we are hated. There is a grinding 
system of exaction ; we take nine-tenths ; and the natives feel the 
privation of honors and places of authority more than the weight of 
imposts. One of them compared our system to a screw, slow in its 
motion, never violent or sudden, but always screwing them down to 
the very earth." 

Another reprehensible feature of British rule in India is the pro- 
miscuous purchased, or enforced concubinage between the British 
officers and native women, — a feature of Indian life so palpable and 
unchallenged that officers and their mistresses are equally received at 
the receptions of the Governor-General. This condition of morals 
under the eye of the Established Church, which has its hierarchy in 
Iudia, is more depraved than the worst periods in the history of 
American slavery. This subject has been thoroughly treated by 
Mrs. Roberts, an English writer, to whom we owe this picture of the 
Governor-General's Court : — 

" The suites of apartments devoted to large evening parties occupy 
the third story. The ball-room, or throne-room, as it is called, is 
approached through a splendid antechamber ; both are floored with 
dark polished wood, and supported by Ionic pillars, leaving a wide 
space in the centre, with an aisle on either side ; handsome sofas of 
blue satin damask are placed between the pillars, and floods of light 
are shed through the whole range from a profusion of cut-glass 
chandeliers and lustres ; formerly the ceilings were painted, but the 
little reverence shown by the white ants to works of art obliged 
them to be removed, and gilt mouldings are now the only ornaments. 
The throne, never particularly superb, is now getting shabby ; a 
canopy of crimson damask surmounted by a crown, and supported 
upon gilt pillars, is raised over a seat of crimson and gold ; in front 
there is a row of gilded chairs, and it is the etiquette for the Viceroy 
and the Yice-Queen, upon occasions of state, to stand before the 
throne to receive the presentation. There is, however, nothing like 
a drawing-room held in this court ; no lord chamberlain, or nobleman, 
in waiting, or any functionaries corresponding with these personages, 
except the aides-de-camp, who are seldom very efficient, being more 
intent upon amusing themselves than anxious to do honors to the 
company. In these degenerate days so little state is kept up, that, 
42 



330 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

after the first half-hour, the representatives of sovereignty quit their 
dignified post and mingle with the assembled crowd. 

"There is no court-dress, or scarcely anything to distinguish the 
public rights at Government House from a private party, excepting 
that until lately no gentleman was permitted to appear in a white 
jacket. An attempt was made by Lady Hastings to establish a more 
rigid system of etiquette ; she had her chamberlain, and her train 
was held up by pages. An intimation was given to the ladies 
that it was expected that they would appear in court plumes, and 
many were prevented from attending in consequence of the dearth of 
ostrich feathers, tlie whole of the supply being speedily bought up ; 
and as it was not considered allowable to substitute native products, 
there was no alternative but to remain at home. The extreme horror 
which European ladies entertained of appearing to imitate the natives, 
banished gold and silver from their robes ; not contented with the dif- 
ference in the fashion of their garments, they refused to wear any 
articles of Indian manufacture, careless of the mean effect produced 
by this fastidiousness." 

Quite different from the British government in India is the Amer- 
ican control of the almost utterly savage tribes of American Indians. 
At present, all Indian affairs are managed by a Commissioner at 
Washington, who is subject to the control of the Secretary of the 
Interior, — a Cabinet officer. The present Commissioner of Indian 
Affairs (1869) is himself an Indian, and an accomplished officer of the 
United States Army, — Colonel Parker, a chief of Iroquois, the most 
renowned confederation of savages ever known on the Western Con- 
tinent. With him, as consulting or active missionaries, are associ- 
ated members of the philanthropic sect of Quakers, fast friends of the 
Indians, and every energy of the government is devoted to concili- 
ating and caring for those unstable wild-men, who have, it is feared, 
been too often made the victims of designing traders. 

In 1869, while preparing this chapter, I waited upon Mr. Taylor, 
the retiring Commissioner of Indian Affairs, and obtained from him 
his experience in the Indian office. At that time violent counsellors 
had proposed to transfer the management of the Indians to the War 
Department, and the Commissioner's remarks were mainly directed 
to combating this proposition. 

In the Indian office proper there are about four hundred and fifty 
employes, only about fifty of whom are employed in the general 
office, the rest being distributed over the country at the various In- 



BRITISH COLONIES AND AMERICAN TERRITORIES. 331 

dian agencies, some as instructors in practical mechanics, menders 
of tools for Indians, interpreters, millers, missionaries, school-mas- 
ters, etc. 

The salaries of these vary from 3,000 dollars to 360 dollars, the 
former sum being paid to the Commissioner, the latter to some of the 
half-breed interpreters. 

In a few moments I was introduced to Mr. W. G-. Taylor, the 
Commissioner. He is a middle-aged gentleman, of a singularly be- 
nevolent face, formerly a Methodist clergyman, and afterward a 
member of Congress from East Tennessee. Owing to the war, he 
was driven to the mountains by the rebels, and upwards of a year 
ago he took charge of this important bureau, in which he has a consci- 
entious missionary interest. It is a popular belief, however, that 
among the older attaches of the bureau, those who belong to what is 
called the " Indian Ring," a system of plunder has long been 
practised. The Commissioner, being a subsidiary officer to the Secre- 
tary of the Interior, has but little more than nominal jurisdiction, but 
his probity and humanity are potent among all who know him, and 
as fairly as any man beneath Hercules can labor in this Augean 
stable, Mr. Taylor has given it his diligence and sagacity. Few njen 
have more thoroughly mastered the diplomacy of the plains, and the 
grand council which he recently held was one of the largest collections 
of Indians ever assembled on the face of the globe, — possibly the 
very largest. 

It was on the occasion of their cession of lands to the Pacific 
Railway, — that fiery track which flashes the signal that the dom- 
ination of the red man exists no more. And possibly it was the un- 
conscious assemblage of the Indian at his own funeral. There, he 
bade farewell to the buffalo, and put upon the prairie a swifter stal- 
lion than his own wild pony, welcoming to the plains with his homely 
formulae of pipes and presents, the courser that is to put a belt around 
the world. 

I had an opportunity to talk with Mr. Taylor at some length, while 
he gave the fresh expression of his opinions, as the latest observer, 
upon the status of the Indian on this Continent. 

A part of the conversation I think worthy of reproduction, as the 
most popular form in which I can transfer some intelligent estimate 
of the relation of the Indian to the present generation and its suc- 
ceeding one. 



332 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

u Mr. Taylor, have you been much personally among the In- 
dians ?" 

44 Yes, sir. I have spent considerably more than half the time 
since I entered upon the duties of this office among the Indian tribes 
on their reservations." 

11 You find much hardship and complaint, — do you not? " 

" Much, sir. The buffalo as a reliable article of subsistence no 
longer exists. In five years I believe that a herd of buffalo will not 
anywhere be seen. The Indians are reduced for supplies to the ante- 
lope, the deer, and occasionally to elk. Looking at this hard destiny, 
they naturally lay it at the white's man's door, to whom, chiefly, 
their poverty is due." 

" How so, sir?" 

" Well ; the wild animals fly before civilization. The steam-engine 
and the wild buffalo cannot exist in the same perspective. If they 
could, our people would turn out to kill the game for mere sport's 
sake, while to the Indian, these great buffalo preserves are his pre- 
cious herds, from which to draw subsistence." 

" The Pacific Railway is really an offensive encroachment to the 
Indian?" 

" Yes ; it is something that offends their vanity by impeaching 
their right of possession. As we would like no man to make a road 
across our lot, they hold their reservations to be absolute property, 
as indeed they are, given them in exchange for government. We 
projected the Pacific Railroad into their country without their permis- 
sion, and the grand council that we held two or three years ago was 
to arrange for their removal, and compose them to it." 

" Do the Indians object to taking new reservation? " 

" Certainly, when they must do it at our convenience. No people 
are more fondly attached to the graves of their forefathers. We fix 
them upon reservations, and as our resistless population catches up to 
their frontiers, — our vanguard, often made up of ruffians and insolent 
people, — collisions ensue, and then the government dispossesses the 
Indian, and pushes him further toward the Pacific. The Indian mind 
is not so obtuse that it cannot see that the world must end some- 
where. Where will they push the Indian, when he gets to the 
end?" 

" You think that many of the Indian wars begin by our disregard 
of the Indian's rights?" 

" I do. The majority, if not all,of the Indian wars, either begin in 



BRITISH COLONIES AND AMERICAN TERRITORIES. 333 

this way, or by a failure on the part of the United States to perform 
its stipulations. Take the war at present (1869) going on, at a large 
expense. We wanted the lands of the Cheyennes and Arrapahoes, for 
the purposes of the Pacific Railroad ; we said to these tribes, in 
grand council, ' We will give you other lands, and teach you upon 
them how to till the ground, for which we will give you ploughs and 
seed, and also sheep and cattle, by which you may be fed, till your 
land becomes productive.' Therefore the Indian consented to be 
removed, and he remained upon his distant reservation peaceably, so 
long as we fed him according to contract. Suddenly, our appropria- 
tion ran out, and we said to the Indian, 'We shall now be unable 
to feed you ; our money is gone/ Unable to live without nourish- 
ment, the Indians, in melancholy bands, roamed back to their former 
lands, and what did they behold? Our people, pushing out along the 
spine of the railway, following up the beds of the streams, and the 
fertile belts, had already overflowed the country. Surprised and 
jealous, the Indians regarded it all with wonder and mortification. 

" Well, they are hungry, and into some isolated house they go, and 
say, ' We are hungry ! We want food ! ' Here is cause for affront. 
Perhaps the food is refused ; then they take it. Or perhaps too 
much is exacted. Perhaps there is a lone woman in the honse^ and 
some of the young savages offer violence. In any event bad feeling 
begins, and war ensues, involving millions of dollars. Now, had the 
Indians been sustained by the government as we promised, all collis- 
ion would have been prevented." 

" Whose fault was it that the appropriation ran out ? " 

" The fault of the false position of this bureau. The government 
has never had an uniform policy toward the Indians ; a succession 
of expedients has been adopted from time to time, to satisfy the 
Indians, but the Commissioner of the bureau is without influence, 
either with Congress or the President. He is an officer of the Secre- 
tary of the Interior, who meantime is busied with the vast and com- 
plicated affairs of his other bureaux, and courtesy and custom demand 
of the Commissioner that he should have no independent dealings, 
but make all his applications to the Secretary only. In fact, Mr. 
Townsend, the Indian Bureau, ought to be an independent dcpart- 
ment." 

" Are its functions so relatively important ?" 

u Yes, sir ; we have as many treaties with the Indian nations as we 
have with foreign nations. An Indian cannot understand why a 



334 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

political dead lock at the Capitol should make the government break 
its word. He demands the fulfilment of a promise as between man 
and man. 

" If the Indian Bureau were even as independent as the Agricultu- 
ral Bureau, I could go to Congress and tell them the necessities 
of my department. Now I must often delay, to satisfy courtesy 
at the expense of misunderstanding, massacre, and expensive war- 
fare." 

" Have you any notion of what should be a definite policy toward 
the Indians ? " 

" It is the province of statesmanship to meet this question. I am 
satisfied that the transfer of this bureau to the War Department 
w r ould be unjust, provoke the helpless massacre of the Indians, and 
be altogether the most un statesmanlike way to deal with them. 
Heretofore, we have kept the Indians in the surf of civilization, driv- 
ing them ahead of us, so that their habits have not ceased to be no- 
madic. A Christian policy toward them would teach civilization to go 
beyond them, and leave them enclosed by it. The Cherokees, Chick- 
asaws, Creeks, and Choctaws, are examples of what the stable, sta- 
tionary Indian can do." 

" Does any great percentage of the Indian's money get to 
him?" 

" There is reason to believe that traders get the bulk of it. Our 
laws about entering the Indian reservations are honored chiefly in the 
breach. Any man can trade on a reservation by getting a judge and 
two citizens to certify that he is an honest man. With two barrels 
of whiskey in a wheelbarrow, and some beads, the trader comes 
into the reservation, takes a squaw to protect himself, and begins the 
systematic work of swindling. 

" The cost of the Indian military expeditions is enormous. For 
example, the military expenditures on account of the Indians, in the 
territory of New Mexico alone, have exceeded four millions of dol- 
lars every year, since its acquisition from Mexico. Gen. Sumner 
proposed to buy out all the white citizens, and give the territory in 
its entirety to the Indians. 

" There are, in all the United States, about three hundred thousand 
Indians, or not three times the population of Delaware. Ninety odd 
thousand of these are in- the Indian Territory, where are all the civil- 
ized tribes. The Sioux are the largest of all the tribes, probably num- 
bering twenty-five thousand, I suppose." 



BRITISH COLONIES AND AMERICAN TERRITORIES. 335 

" You feel, therefore, Mr. Taylor, that this Indian problem is not 
too vague for statesmanship to take up?" 

" No, sir ; but it is too grave a subject to be treated as a fragment 
of a duty, hidden away in a recess of the Interior Department. 
Whatever defects have existed here are allowed to moulder, and 
grow in the dark. Congress cannot dismiss this subject in an hour's 
debate. Only by a familiar knowledge of the Indian character can 
we treat with the Indian, as an enlightened responsibility demands 
that we should, so that the ground may not descend to us, with his 
curse upon it." 

" You have never employed Indians in the bureau clerically?" 

« No, sir." 

" Those who come to Washington,- — do they accomplish any good 
result ? 

" Yes ; they go home with formidable stories of the white man's 
powers, which dispose the tribes to peace. The Indian is very igno- 
rant, except of that which is demonstrated to his senses. Hearing of 
the big lodges, the great canoes, and the mighty encampments does 
them good in a pacific way." 

Since the United States became a nation, it has,, in general, made 
acquisitions of territory, by peaceful purchase, the exception having 
been the war with Mexico, but even in this case a formidable portion 
of our people denounced the war, and in the end we paid liberally for 
the territory subtracted, or, in terms, one hundred dollars to every 
white man resident in the whole conquest. 

The United Slates acquired Florida in perhaps a more irregular 
manner than any of its territory. Napoleon Bonaparte, anxious to 
raise money, prevailed upon the Spaniards to give him Florida, and 
immediately sold it to us ; but this irregularity led to such uncertainty 
in the titles of property, that to this day the State is very sparsely 
settled, and in our haste to occupy it we offended the Indians, so 
that it is computed that the Seminole War alone cost us thirty mil- 
lion dollars, besides the loss of many valuable lives. 

The entire purchase-money for Louisiana w r as fifteen million dol- 
lars ; but at that time Louisiana was not the name of a State, as now ; 
it represented the vast tract of country lying on the lower Missis- 
sippi and the Gulf. 

Fifteen millions of dollars were paid to Mexico for California, so 
that thirty-seven millions, including seven millions for Alaska, is the 
sum total of our national acquisitions in real estate. 



336 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

Negotiations were entered into by Mr. W. H. Seward, our Secre- 
tary of State, in 1868, to buy the Island of St. Thomas, in the West 
Indies ; but Congress, holding that the Secretary had no right to spend 
money without authority, refused to ratify the purchase, and this led 
to considerable ill-feeling on the part of the Danish government. 
The people of St. Thomas testified their wish to become citizens of 
the United States, by voting almost unanimously for annexation. 
Mr. James Parton, an industrious author, has taken position that 
good faith requires us to ratify the treaty, and he urges the following 
considerations : — 

" That we cannot repudiate Mr. Seward's bargain without inflicting 
a very great and irreparable injury upon a respectable nation, our 
good friend and ally. 

" That if, after paying for Alaska, we refuse to pay for these isl- 
ands, we stand dishonored before mankind, as having one rule for 
the strong and another for the weak. 

" That, however erroneous may be the system which permits the 
Executive to commit the country to purchases of land, we have no 
right to hold Denmark responsible for that system, nor to reform it at 
her expense. 

" That, when a foreign government has so much as delayed the 
ratification and execution of a properly concluded treaty with the 
United States, we have felt ourselves to be grossly wronged, and were 
willing to seek redress by violence. 

" That these islands, in the opinion of professional men, have a 
great and peculiar value, which renders their acquisition highly desir- 
able." 

The advice of Washington, in the Farewell Address, is conserv- 
atively just upon this, as upon almost every international question : — 

" It is our true policy ," he says, " to steer clear of permanent 
alliances with any portion of the foreign world, so far, I mean, as we 
are now at liberty to do it, for, let me not be understood as capable 
of patronizing infidelity to existing engagements. I hold the maxim 
no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is 
always the best policy. I repeat it, therefore, let those engagements 
be observed, in their genuine sense ; but in my opinion it is unnec- 
essary, and would be unwise to extend them." 

Far different from the conquest of India was the peaceful discovery 
and settlement of Australia by England, and relative results have 
proved it no less beneficent. 



BRITISH COLONIES AND AMERICAN TERRITORIES. 337 

Victoria is the wealthiest of the Australian nations, and, India 
alone excepted, has the largest trade of any of the dependencies of 
Great Britain. 

A party landed in 1835 upon the Yarra banks, mooring their boat 
to the forest-trees, and they formed a settlement upon a grass}^ hill, 
behind a marsh, and began to pasture sheep where Melbourne, the 
capital, now stands. In twenty years Melbourne became the largest 
city, but one in the southern hemisphere, having one hundred and fifty 
thousand people within her limits. Victoria has grander public 
buildings in her capital, larger and more costly railroads, a greater 
income, and a heavier debt than any other colony, and she pays to 
her Governor fifty thousand dollars a 3 r ear, or one-fourth more than 
even New South Wales. When looked into, all this success means 
gold. There is industry, there is energy, there is talent, there is 
generosity and public spirit ; but they are the abilities and virtues 
that gold will bring, in bringing a rush from all the world of clashing 
fellows in the prime of life. The progress of Melbourne is that of 
San Francisco. "Some of the New South Welsh," says Mr. Dilke, an 
author, " shutting their eyes to the facts connected with the gold rush, 
assert so loudly that the Victorians are the refuse of California, or 
' Yankee scum,' that when I first landed in Melbourne, I expected 
to find street-cars, revolvers, big hotels, and fire-clubs, euchre, 
caucuses, and mixed drinks. I could discover nothing American 
about Melbourne except the grandeur of the public buildings and the 
width of the streets, and its people are far more thoroughly British 
than are the citizens of the rival capital. In many senses Melbourne 
is the London, Sydney the Paris, of Australia." 

Liberia is the only American colony that has ever been planted on 
a foreign continent. This government is almost an exact reproduc- 
tion in miniature of the United States. It was established for the pur- 
pose of building up an independent nation of English-speaking Africans ; 
but the emancipation of the whole race, during the civil war, rendered 
foreign exile unnecessary and unpopular. The whole revenue of 
Liberia is not above sixty thousand dollars a year. Its most dis- 
tinguished president has returned to America, and is a resident of 
Washington. Great Britain has probably met no more formidable 
opposition, in any of her Oceanic colonies, than in New Zealand, or 
Tasmania, where war with the native Maoris still continues. The 
lesser British colonies in Asia, Polynesia, and the southern hemi- 
sphere, do not require description, as their government has been 
43 



338 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

already described. In a future chapter upon South America, the Brit- 
ish islands in the West Indies will be noticed. One of the most cel- 
ebrated insular colonies of England is Mauritius, or Isle de France, 
off the coast of Madagascar ; it is described in the pretty French stoiy 
of "Paul and Virginia." This island and its accessories were cap- 
tured from the French, in 1810, by a grand expedition. It contains 
less than two hundred thousand persons, yet pays its Governor 
thirty-five thousand dollars a year. All the more important British 
colonies are assessed the salaries of their governors. Under a 
democratic form of government, where the people have liberty to go 
at large, and to agitate as they please, it is not wonderful that the 
inherent lust to conquer should frequently develop itself in un- 
authorized expeditions to the weaker coasts and islands in our 
neighborhood. Cuba, Central America, parts of Mexico, and Canada 
have, at different times, been partly possessed by bands of fillibus- 
ters ; the Sandwich Islands are held in request by many of our manifest- 
destinarians, and American adventurers have stormed the walls of 
Pekin. Our government has, in every case but one, disavowed these 
enterprises ; for the belief in the American mind that we shall peace- 
ably succeed to the dominion of all North America is too settled to 
exhibit itself in these merely boyish amusements. On this continent 
we are the colonizing race, as the British in the East. Dutch, French, 
Portuguese, and Spanish have borne away prizes in past generations, 
but the only colonies which promise permanently to endure have 
been planted by the Anglo-Saxon race. Sixty years ago, France 
possessed two-thirds of North America. Her colonists could assimi- 
late with the savages, but not without losing their own civilization ; 
and the agile French half-breeds of Hudson's Bay have become the 
pliant instruments of the organizing English mind. 

" There was once a time," says De Tocqueville, sadly, " at which 
we also might have created a great French nation in the American 
wilds, to counterbalance the influence of the English upon the desti- 
nies of the New World. France formerly possessed a territory in 
North America, scarcely less extensive than the whole of Europe. 
The three greatest rivers of that continent then flowed within her do- 
minions. The Indian tribes which dwelt between the mouth of the 
St. Lawrence and the delta of the Mississippi were unaccustomed to 
any other tongue but ours ; and all the European settlements scattered 
over that immense region recalled the traditions of our country. 
Louisbourg, Montmorency, Duquesne, Saint Louis, Vincennes, New 



BRITISH COLONIES AND AMERICAN TERRITORIES. 339 

Orleans (for such were the names they bore) are words clear to 
France and familiar to our ears. 

" But a concourse of circumstances, which it would be tedious to 
enumerate, have deprived us of this magnificent inheritance. 
Wherever the French settlers were numerically weak, and partially 
established they have disappeared ; those who remain are collected on 
a small extent of county, and are now subject to other laws. The 
four hundred thousand French inhabitants of Lower Canada consti- 
tute, at the present time, the remnant of an old nation lost in the 
midst of a new people. 

11 The impulse of the British race in the New World cannot be 
arrested. The dismemberment of the Union, and the hostilities which 
might ensue, the abolition of republican institutions, and the tyran- 
nical government which might succeed it, may retard this impulse, 
but they cannot prevent it from ultimately fulfilling the destinies to 
which that race is reserved. No power upon earth can close upon 
the emigrants that fertile wilderness which offers resources to all in- 
dustry, and a refuge from want. Future events, of whatever nature 
they may be, will not deprive the Americans of their climate, or of 
their inland seas, of their great rivers, or of their exuberant soil. 
Nor will bad laws, revolutions, and anarchy be able to obliterate 
that love of prosperity and that spirit of enterprise which seem to 
be the distinctive characteristics of their race, or to extinguish that 
knowledge which guides them on their way." 

What is to be the fate of the British colonies? In India and 
China, where the British constitute a mere garrison, and handful of 
hangers-on, it is impossible that they can keep root save by constant 
and wearisome struggles. Australia is almost ripe already to drop 
from the parent bough, and plant her own offspring in the island 
seas. Canada must also quit the bough, and she can but obey the 
law of gravitation, which will bind her to our destinies. For the 
lesser colonies of England, they may be retained so long as British 
commerce maintains its sway, but these scattered over the surface 
of the earth will not, of themselves, make an empire. 

The United States, compact, individual, youthful, enterprising, ex- 
pects to construct an empire by no such piecemeal process. She has 
but to open her gates, and the hufnan sluices from both worlds pour 
in and people her. Ller system of admitting new States into her 
counsels is wisely representative. The Territories of the United 
States are governed by a Magistrate appointed by the President, and 



34:0 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

under him an embryo Legislature meets ; in Congress they are rep- 
resented by a delegate, who can speak upon all matters affecting 
his Territory, but cannot vote. When the Territory shows signs of 
strength and empire, it is admitted into the Union, if its constitution 
is a proper one and its population adequate. Thus the work of local 
self-government extends itself westward. First, we formed the nation 
out of thirteen colonies ; then we formed our wild regions into Terri- 
tories, and they organized themselves and came to the capital to so- 
licit admission ; then we acquired more domain, and it developed into 
Territory and State successively. This process of absorption and 
organization will continue till we shall have formed this continent 
into infinite self-governments, with a common intelligence directing 
the vital life of all, while all shall be free to lead the separate exist- 
ence of neighborhoods. England, on the contrary, conquers to bend 
and drain. We invite new lands into our family, and we help and 
influence them. 

At present (1869) there are waiting for admission to the republic 
nine Territories, each pressing every energy to meet the require- 
ments of the law and be recognized as integral parts of the United 
States. Our hardest territorial problem is the Indian, and that is a 
problem which the Englishman has in every colony. Providence 
reserved for our nation chiefly the naked and fertile land ; had he 
packed it with people of ancient civilizations we should have the 
work before us that is making the Englishman despair. And what 
is to be our population ? 

An editorial writer in the " Chicago Tribune/' has made a conserv- 
ative answer to this question, when he says, that "it is highly 
improbable that the population of the United States, by the impend- 
ing census of 1870, will fall short of forty millions, and it is quite 
likely to reach forty-one millions." Let us compare these figures 
with those presented by other civilized powers, in order to obtain at 
a glance their relative ranks in the scale of nations : — 



Russia in Europe 
Russia in Asia . 

Russia total 
United States . 
Alaska purchase 

United States total 



Population. Sq. Miles. 

70,000,000 2,066,000 

8,500,000 5,748,000 



78,500,000 7,814,000 

41,000,000 3,000,000 

75,000 500,000 



41,075,000 3,500,000 



BRITISH COLONIES AND AMERICAN TERRITORIES. 341 

Population. Sq. Miles. 

Trance 39,500,000 207,000 

Austria 36,000,000 230,000 

Great Britain . . . . . 30,000,000 123,000 

German Confederation . . . 29,500,000 190,000 

Italy 26,000,000 118,000 

Spain . 18,000,000 183,000 

Brazil 9,000,000 2,973,400 

Mexico . . . . . . 8,000,000 830,000 

In the table we have not added to Great Britain her foreign col- 
onies and possessions. If all the subjects, Christian and Pagan, of 
the Queen of Great Britain, scattered over the world, were included, 
the number would exceed one hundred and sixty millions, and the 
area under her sway eight million square miles. But her Christian 
subjects are less than thirty-five millions of souls, which places the 
number still below that of the United States. 

All the above enumerated population, except Russia, have their 
laws framed by legislative bodies elected by the people. It will 
therefore be perceived that in point of population the United States 
stands at the head of the self-governing powers. This is not re- 
markable to Americans, as we have, many years ago, accepted our 
destiny to be at the head of powers and civilizations ; still the curi- 
ous facts of future decades are interesting. On the basis of the 
average increase of the last eighty years, the United States will have 
in 1880 the surprising number of fifty-six million four hundred and 
fifty thousand ; in 1890, it will have seventy-seven million two hun- 
dred and sixty-six thousand ; and in July, 1900, no less than one 
hundred million three hundred and fifty-five thousand nine hundred 
and eighty-five people. 

And wiiat attached these people to us ? 

In part, undoubtedly, our zone, and the natural endowments of 
this portion of the globe. In part, and of late years, our vindicated 
national character and the safety of our institutions. But the magnet 
in America is that we are a republic ! A republican people ! Cursed 
with artificial government, however glittering, the people of Europe, 
like the sick, pine for nature with protection, for open vistas and 
blue sky, for independence without ceremony, for adventure in their 
own interest, — and here they find it ! 

We can therefore be thrilled with the idea of an empire which can- 
not soon dissolve. But a more melancholy vision rises upon the eye 



342 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

of the Englishman, and is gracefully expressed in a passage from one 
of his representative journals : — 

" The sceptre may pass away from us ; unforeseen accidents may 
derange our most profound schemes of policy ; victory may be incon- 
stant to our arms ; but there are triumphs which are followed by no 
reverses. There is an empire exempt from all natural causes of de- 
cay. These triumphs are the pacific triumphs of reason over barba- 
rism ; that empire is the imperishable empire of our arts and our 
morals, our literature and our laws ! " 

Looking back to the severance of our colonies from England, we 
can feel how memorable was that step to the progress of mankind, by 
observing in the literature and politics of all lands the reverence paid 
to our resolution. The better Englishmen find consolation for it in 
the improvement of our race and the growth of liberty ; the meaner, 
like Browne Roberts, in the apparent calamities of our allies. 

" Upon this American war," he says, " the resources of our country 
had been poured forth with a lavish hand, and its termination left her 
in a state of great exhaustion, with her most bitter enemies exulting 
on all hands at her temporary humiliation. This exultation, how- 
ever, was amply compensated for a few years after, in the calamities 
both of France and Spain ; the former of these countries having 
learned, from contact with America, those revolutionary principles 
which soon deluged her own soil with blood, and the latter experi- 
encing an equally prejudical effect in the loss of her South American 
colonies, which were not long in following the example of indepen- 
dence given them by their brethren of the North." 

We can at this interval, and in the light of our beneficent influ- 
ence in accomplishing just those things which are above decried, 
recall with curiosity, but without emotion, the speech which old King 
George III. made to the first American Minister he was obliged to 
receive : — 

" In thus admitting their separation from the Crown of these 
kingdoms, I have sacrificed every consideration of my own to the 
wishes and opinions of my people. I make it my humble and earnest 
prayer to Almighty God, that Great Britain may not feel the evils 
which might result from so great a dismemberment of the empire ; 
and that America may be free from the calamities which have for- 
merly proved in the mother country how essential monarchy is to the 
enjoyment of constitutional liberty. Religion, language, interest, 
affections, may, and I hope will, yet prove a bond of permanent union 



BRITISH COLONIES AND AMERICAN TERRITORIES. 343 

between the two countries. To this end neither attention nor dispo- 
sition on my part shall be wanting." 

This speech and this farewell have yet to be repeated by many 
British sovereigns. 



CHAPTEE XIIL 

THE BRITISH AND AMERICAN ARMY AND NAVY. 

Notices of the technical institutions of war of either country, and the composition of the 
army and navy. — Representative episodes and personages of the services of the two 
nations. 

"The Army and the Navy" is always the favorite toast at an 
English banquet. The Englishman believes that his army is as 
invincible as his navy, and holds the name of Wellington to be as 
eminent in the history of warfare as that of Napoleon. The experi- 
ences of the Crimea somewhat unsettled this patriotic superstition, 
but the success of the Ab3'ssinian and Indian wars have pretty well 
restored the equanimity of the Briton's belief in the invincibility of 
his " foot-soldiery." 

The Anglo-Saxon has always been a combative, not to say a mili- 
tary, race. The same impulse which led to, Anglo-Saxon love of 
liberty, early declared itself in opposition to standing armies at 
home; and this is the distinguishing peculiarity of both our nation- 
alities, that we have a fixed dislike to a permanent soldiery upon 
land, and a reverence for the prowess of our navies. 

The British Navy is a permanent institution, and is not, like the 
Army, allowed on sufferance, and renewed from year to year. Seamen 
have civil privileges be}- ond those of the soldier} r , and in the Navy 
" seniority" determines promotion and not purchase. 

We have the same inherited notions in America with regard to our 
Army and Navy ; our Legislatures dislike standing armies, and sel- 
dom make objection to the permanence of the Navy. As the law of 
England recognizes no other permanent armed force on land than the 
National Militia, the American Republic places its chief dependence 
upon its volunteers. 

The Army, as it stood before the war, was the smallest organization 
consistent with public safety in time of peace. We had, in 1860 ? 
eleven thousand eight hundred and forty-eight enlisted men, and one 
thousand eighty-three commissioned officers. In July, 1866, Congress 

344 





MILITARY INSTITUTIONS. 

1— Woolwich Academy, England. 2— School of St. Cyr, France. 

3— "West Point, New York. 



THE BRITISH AND AMERICAN ARMY AND NAVY. 345 

discussed very fully what should be its future Army, and, after a long 
debate in both Houses, passed the law of July 28, 1866, fixing the 
military peace establishment. That law authorized five regiments 
of artillery, ten of cavalry, and forty-five of infantry. The minimum 
strength and the maximum strength of a regiment of each arm of the 
service was fixed, so that the Army might contain eighty thousand 
three hundred and seventy enlisted men as the maximum, while the 
minimum strength was forty-seven thousand two hundred and seventy 
enlisted men. Whether it should be in fact the larger or the smaller 
number, or any intermediate number, was left to the discretion of 
the President of the United States. 

In March, 1869, as the records of the War Department showed, we 
had a chain of fortified posts along our coast, extending from East- 
port, in Maine, on the Atlantic, to Sitka, in Alaska, on the Pacific, 
mounting three thousand two hundred and fifty coast guns ; and we 
had enough enlisted men in the artillery to enable us to put two men 
to each gun. 

The present Army of the United States consisted of nearly fifty 
thousand men, until the spring of 1869, when, on complaint in Con- 
gress of its expensiveness, it was reduced to about thirty-five 
thousand. 

The British Army, in 1868, consisted of one hundred and forty 
thousand men ; there were sixty-five thousand soldiers in India alone. 
It is upon the militia force of the United States that we place our 
chief dependence, and this was estimated in 1868 to consist of three 
million three hundred thousand men. 

During the civil war in the South which lasted from 1861 to 1865, 
the Northern and Border States contributed nearly two million seven 
hundred thousand men to the service of the National Government ; 
Massachusetts furnishing twenty thousand more soldiers than com- 
posed the standing army of England ; four of the States gave to the 
army one-fifth their entire population ; during the same period the 
Southern States had four hundred thousand men almost constantly in 
the field. 

Great Britain draws but one in two thousand from production, 
and keeps but one hundred and eighty-eight thousand regular troops 
in time of peace, at a yearly cost of seventy-one million dollars. In 
1867-8, even these figures were reduced fifteen per cent. 

Great Britain's Army, including the forces in India, is estimated at 
one hundred and eighty-eight thousand regulars, one hundred and 



346 THE NEW WOKLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

thirty thousand regular reserve, and one hundred and eighty-four 
thousand last reserve. Of the first reserve, all except two thousand 
regulars are pensioners and militia ; while the last reserve is made up 
of fourteen thousand yeomanry, and one hundred and seventy thou- 
sand volunteers. The British Army recruits fourteen thousand 
annually, out of a population of twenty-nine million. These recruits, 
of course, go into the regular Army, where they serve twelve years ; 
the reserves being, with the exception of the pensioners, little more 
than voluntary organizations under the patronage of the government. 

The English Militia establishment is a small affair, comprising in 
1867 forty-two regiments, with about ninety thousand officers and 
men ; seven of these regiments are in Lancashire and eight in 
London. 

At a great review of militia, held the same year, fifty-two thousand 
men were in line in Scotland and Ireland. 

Great Britain pays in pensions more than ten and one-half millions 
of dollars a year. 

The English Militia was allowed to fall into decay after the ex- 
pulsion of the Stuarts, on account of the supposition that it was con- 
trolled by the old Tory landed gentry, who were not favorable to the 
revolution ; still militia officers receive salaries, which is not the case 
in America, except when the militia are called out by the Governor. 
All the English militia officers, down to Captain, must have a prop- 
erty qualification, and a Colonel receives three thousand dollars a 
year. Nearly all the officers are Justices of the Peace ; they are ap- 
pointed by the Lords Lieutenant, or County Governors, who are the 
commanding officers in each county, and all the militia are under 
control of the Home Secretary, who is a member of the Cabinet in 
London. The English yeomanry is a separate body, now of little 
practicable account, which originated when Napoleon Bonaparte 
threatened to invade England. 

In Ireland there are nearly thirteen thousand policemen acting as 
soldiers. In India there are upwards of one hundred thousand native 
troops, most of whom are heathens. 

Out of every thousand recruits of the British Army, three hundred 
and twenty are Irishmen, and a hundred and twelve Scotchmen. 

England has also a volunteer force of a hundred and sixty thou- 
sand men, but these are mainly holiday soldiers, like the militia 
soldiers of our larger American cities. 

Parliament votes large sums to support and encourage the English 



THE BKITISH AND AMERICAN ARMY AND NAVY. 347 

Militia and volunteers ; in 1867 one million eight hundred thousand 
dollars was the parliamentary grant to the volunteers alone. 

In the same year the total cost of the British Army was seventy 
millions of dollars. Prior to the civil war in the South, the United 
States Army consisted of only fourteen thousand men. Prior to the 
American civil war, we had no military rank higher than that of 
Lieutenant-General by brevet, but the remarkable services of Lieuten- 
ant-General Grant, and the increase of our regular Army, led to the 
revival of the rank of General, and in the same period we created 
Admirals in the naval service. The latter innovation was made 
chiefly on account of the embarrassments of our naval officers abroad 
in mingling familiarly with those of European nations, but the new 
distinction in the Army was meant to be an extraordinary form of ex- 
pressing the national gratitude to General Grant. 

While no movement has been made against the dignity of our 
Admirals, considerable feeling has been manifested against continu- 
ing the grade of General. After General Grant was elevated to the 
presidency, Mr. Butler, an ex-General of volunteers, made a formal 
attack upon the pay and perquisites of officers of the regular Army, 
and he gave this exhibit of the financial situation of our line officers 
as he proposed it. It is probable that his figures are as nearly accu- 
rate as those of any authority we can summon. 

A Brigadier-General, chief of the department, has $7,606.50 if he 
is stationed at Washington ; a Colonel has 4,392 dollars ; a Lieutenant- 
Colonel, 3,826 dollars ; a Major, 3,537 dollars ; a mounted Captain, 
2,725 dollars ; a Captain, not mounted, 2,605 dollars ; a First Lieu- 
tenant mounted, 2,177 dollars ; a First Lieutenant, not mounted, 2,137 
dollars ; a Second Lieutenant mounted, 2,177 dollars ; a Second Lieu- 
tenant, not mounted, 2,077 dollars. So that a Second Lieutenant, just 
out of school, gets 2,000 dollars a year, and this is outside of his com- 
mutation for his forage, and outside of his allowance for travel. 

Abuses having crept into the Army, Mr. Butler, himself an officer 
of experience, proposed that the permanent Army establishment be 
fixed as follows. I use his own terms : — 

" I have fixed the pay of each grade of officers in this form, sub- 
ject, of course, to the better judgment of the House : Lieutenant- 
General to have 12,000 dollars a year, — 4,000 dollars more than the 
Speaker of this House, and 4,000 dollars more than the Vice-Pres- 
ident; Major-General, 7,500 dollars; Brigadier-General, 5,000 dol- 
lars ; Colonel, 3,500 dollars ; Lieutenant-Colonel, 2,750 dollars ; 



34:8 THE NEW WOKLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

Major, 2,500 dollars; Captain, mounted, 2,000 dollars; Captain, not 
mounted, 1,800 dollars; Adjutant, 1,800 dollars; Regimental Quar- 
termaster, 1,800 dollars; First Lieutenant, mounted, 1,600 dollars; 
First Lieutenant, not mounted, 1,500 dollars; Second Lieutenant, 
mounted, 1,500 dollars; Second Lieutenant, not mounted, 1,400 dol- 
lars; Chaplain, 1,200 dollars; Aide-de-camp to Major-General, 200 
dollars in addition to pay of his rank ; Aide-de-camp to Brigadier- 
General, 150 dollars in addition to pay of his rank ; Acting Assistant 
Commissary, 100 dollars in addition to pay of his rank ; and that 
these sums shall be in full of everything. 

" Then I provide that commutation for fuel, quarters, forage, 
rations, longevity-rations, servants' clothing, pay and rations, and 
everything of that sort in the way of allowances, shall be done, 
ended, cease, be got rid of, cut off, and put a stop to. [Laughter.] 
I provide that that great abuse shall be finally brought to an end, if 
it is possible to be done by legislative act. I have provided, how- 
ever, when officers travel they shall have ten cents per mile. ,, 

It is probable that the future regular Army of the United States 
will be organized upon Mr. Butler's plan, although the grade of 
General has been transiently retained, at the request of President 
Grant, in favor of General Sherman, his successor. 

The Commander-in-chief of the British Army is generally a mem- 
ber of the ro} r al family, and at present he is the Duke of Cambridge, 
the Queen's cousin, a gentleman who, being disqualified as a member 
of the royal family from marrying an English woman, has children 
by a virtuous lady, who are yet illegitimate before the law. Down to 
the year 1846 the Commander-in-chief was a member of the Cabinet, 
but he is now controlled by it ; at the same time he has the high 
privilege of personally communicating with the Queen, in whose 
name he issues all his orders. His military Secretary is an impor- 
tant personage, with a salary of ten thousand dollars, who holds 
levees at which officers and others having business to transact, find 
access to him. His campaigns are generally planned by the Secre- 
tary of War ; but in the field he is supreme, and the enormous pat- 
ronage of his office makes him powerful in peace as in war, as he 
recommends for all military appointments and promotions, and makes 
all the fees and percentages out of his own great office. He has no 
control whatever over the general finance of the Army, and cannot 
move his troops without the consent of the Secretary of War. 

The position of Commander-in-chief of the British Army has been 



THE BRITISH AND AMERICAN ARMY AND NAYY. 349 

frequently abused, and in 1809 Col. Wardell, a militia officer, made a 
direct impeachment in Parliament of the Duke of York, the King's 
son and Commander-in-chief. He indicated a house in Gloucester 
Place, splendid with carriages, servants, and fine furniture, as the 
nest of the corruption he spoke of. In this house, he said, the Duke 
of York had placed his mistress, — a woman named Mary Anne 
Clarke, — who was in the habit, as could be proved, of selling 
offices in the Army by means of her favor with the Commander-in- 
chief. Mrs. Clarke had, in one instance, taken a bribe of five hun- 
dred pounds, which she paid over to a silversmith as part-payment for 
a service of plate, — the Duke of York discharging the remainder. 
Other cases were detailed, which convinced the hearers, in the midst 
of their consternation, that there must be some ground for the charges. 
The positions laid down by Colonel Wardell were, that Mrs. Clarke 
possessed the power of military promotion ; that she took money for 
the use of that power ; and that the Commander-in-chief shared the 
money. There were further allegations of Mrs. Clarke having been 
bribed by clergymen and gentlemen to procure appointments in the 
Church and the State ; but the military abuses were those that the 
House had first to deal with. 

This denunciation of the regular Army by the militia much re- 
sembles the raid on the regular Army officers by the volunteers in 
1868-9. 

The Generals on the English home service, comprising the " home 
staff," are appointed as commanding officers over the several districts, 
England and Wales being divided into five districts, Scotland and 
the Channel Islands into three, and Ireland forming a chief district, 
with five subdivisions. The greater colonies have in like manner 
their foreign staffs. 

An English Field-Marshal, acting as Commmander-in-chief, receives 
about eighty-two dollars a day in gold, but if he be below the rank 
of Field-Marshal he receives forty-seven dollars a day ; a General 
receives twenty-eight dollars a day ; a Lieutenant-General nineteen 
dollars ; a Major-General nine dollars ; a Brigadier-General seven dol- 
lars ; a Colonel six and a half dollars a day. To all the above seven 
hundred and fifty dollars a year are paid, as an additional allowance ; 
the above are all staff officers. Cavalry Colonels in the field receive 
forty-five hundred dollars a year ; Lieutenant-Colonels about seven 
dollars a day ; Infantry Colonels receive twenty-five hundred dollars 
a year ; Lieutenant-Colonels four dollars and a quarter a day ; Privates 



350 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

in the field receive from twenty-five to thirty-seven cents a clay. 
Officers attached to the Queen's household troops are paid much 
better, Colonels receiving as high as nine thousand dollars a year. 

After serving eighteen years, or if disabled or dismissed by reduc- 
tion of the Army, officers are permitted to retire on half-pay, a 
Colonel's half-pay being nearly four dollars a day, a Captain's about 
a dollar and seventy-five cents a day ; besides, Parliament grants 
about seventy-five thousand dollars a }^ear for extra pensions, which 
is distributed in sums of five hundred dollars to retired officers of 
high rank. 

The most extraordinary feature of the English military service 
to an American observer is the purchase and sale of officers' com- 
missions. Except a few distinguished cadets from Sandhurst Col- 
lege, and occasional appointments of non-commissioned officers for 
remarkable services, all the military commissions in the British 
Army are paid for, and the rate is fixed b} r law. A man can buy the 
rank of Lieutenant-Colonel in the Life Guards for about thirty-seven 
thousand dollars, and in the Foot Guards for forty-five thousand 
dollars ; in the Dragoons thirty thousand dollars. A Captain's com- 
mission brings nine thousand dollars in the Dragoons, twenty-four 
thousand dollars in the Foot Guards, and seventeen thousand five 
hundred dollars in the Life Guards and Horse Guards. This is con- 
sidered to be a good investment for one's money, as it pays him a 
good interest, gives him rank and employment, and opportunities for 
distinction. There are generally a great number of candidates 
ready to buy commissions ; they must apply to the Commander- 
in-chief, who, when opportunities arise, selects those whom he thinks 
fit for commissions. 

When an American officer resigns his commission he has no inter- 
est in its transfer, and he thus loses not only his yearly salary, but 
the capital it represents. An Army Colonel, who was about to resign 
in 18G9, said to me that he was not onl} 7 losing some five thousand 
dollars a } r ear, but the eighty thousand dollars in capital which it 
represented. 

While an Army commission in America is thus more or less depend- 
ent upon temporary political feeling, its possession may be said to 
confer even more honor than under a monarchical government ; for 
in a republic, where there are no titles of honor, the Army and the 
Navy confer almost the sole consideration. 

A recent Army critic, Wraxall, speaks in the following satirical 



THE BRITISH AND AMERICAN ARMY AND NAVY. 351 

yet truthful way, of the semi-aristocratic organization of the English 
Army : — 

" An English officer's education is expressed by so many pounds 
sterling. Lord Tuppingham has been a very tiresome fellow, from 
the day when, to the horror of the Earl's servants, he could walk 
alone. He revelled in mischief of all kinds before he could write his 
name. You know the wondrous splutter upon paper which stands for 
his venerable name even now, in his thirty-second year. It was im- 
possible to cram any serviceable knowledge into his head. But then, 
of what use was knowledge to the head that bore aloft, along the 
broad pavement of Piccadilly, such a hat? Knowledge is the neces- 
sity of the head that wears no hat. Lord Tuppingham went to Eton 
and learned boating. He went to Cambridge and learned smoking, 
and drinking, and the elements of gambling. He reached London, 
prepared to hold a command in the Army, to patrol the Haymarket, 
and mortgage his estates in St. James Street. On more than one 
occasion, while the play ran high, he would composedly eat plover's 
eggs that had just cost him one hundred pounds each. Now, with the 
vices, and not the studies, of Eton and Cambridge, he was ' fit for 
nothing but the Army.' Brave, he certainly was. He thrashed a 
drayman at college, and will be a prominent figure if his regiment go 
to the war. But then, suppose he has his men the wrong way ; sup- 
pose that his cards and wine have been cultivated at the expense of 
his military duties ; suppose that he is put on the staff before he is 
able to understand one of the vitally important duties of a staff 
officer? Lives are lost. The blood of lion-hearted men, and his 
own, flows in vain. Of one hundred and sixteen staff officers sent 
originally with the British Army to the Crimea, one hundred and 
nine were Lord Tuppinghams ! " 

Another extraordinary feature of the English Army is the military 
nierarchy or priesthood, composed of various ecclesiastics of the 
Established Church, who have actual rank as Field-Marshals, Gen- 
erals, Colonels, Captains, Cornets, and Ensigns, and truly may be 
said to belong to the church militant. 

Both England and America, and indeed all civilized nations, have 
military institutions for the education of young officers, and it may 
truthfully be said, that those of America have obtained reputation 
equal to those of any Continental power, and superior to that of 
England. The Academy at West Point is better known in Europe 
than any military school in England, and the periodical arrival of 



3.~2 the new world compared with the old. 

our Naval School fleet in European waters is made a subject of curi- 
ous and reverential scrutiny. These institutions fully bear out the 
democratic character of our government. Some of the worthiest 
officers in our service have been of the poorest origin ; amongst tl. 
dismissing all recent prejudices, may be mentioned the names of 
Ulysses S. Grant, and T. Jonathan [" Stonewall"] Jackson. 

These fountains of honor in America are the Military Academy of 
West Point, and the Naval School at Annapolis. 

The United States Military Academy at West Point, on the Hud- 
son River, fifty miles above New York, is the place where the officers 
of our regular Army are educated; they are nominated to West 
Point by members of Congress, each Representative having the right 
to select one. lad to be a cadet every two years. The candidate so 
nominated undergoes an examination, physical and mental, and if 
accepted, passes through the long and exacting course of studies ; 
if lie graduates successfully, he is made an officer in the Arm}', and 
his subsequent career depends upon the exigencies of the service and 
his own ability. There are also numerous private and State military 
institutions in various parts of the Union, prominent among which 
are the Military Academies at Lexington, Virginia, and Frankfort, 
Kentucky. 

In 18G8, the Military Committee of Congress proposed to encour- 
age the formation of private military schools throughout the country, 
and introduced a bill to provide colleges with military professors 
from the regular Army. The bill was disapproved, and in the debate 
considerable dislike of military establishments was exhibited. 

In England there are several military schools, which cost altogther 
nearly nine hundred thousand dollars a year. Besides the Council 
of Military Education, there is the Royal Military Academy at 
Woolwich, the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, the Royal 
Hibernian Military School at Dublin, the Military Medical School, 
and the Department for the Instruction of Artillery Officers, and 
there are also schools and libraries in all the British garrisons, 
besides a military branch of the Chelsea Asylum, at London, which 
educates five hundred boys a year. 

To show the efficiency of West Point, I need only cite General 
Garfield's remarks upon its record during the civil war : — 

" Among the field officers, I find that of the whole number, three 
hundred and forty-nine thousand one hundred and thirty-five are 
from West Point, — thirty-nine per cent. Of the general officers, 



THE BRITISH AND AMERICAN ARMY AND NAVY. 353 

twenty-five in all, twenty-one are from West Point, and four only from 
civil life. Of the Army staff, numbering six hundred and eighty- 
one persons, two hundred and seven are from West Point, and four 
hundred and seventy-four from civil life, those from West Point being 
thirty and a half per cent, of the whole number. Of the staff 
department proper, however, embracing the Adjutant-General's 
office, the Engineer Corps, etc., two hundred and forty-nine officers in 
all, two hundred and twenty-nine are from West Point, and only 
twenty from civil life." 

The picturesque and historical associations of West Point are far 
more remarkable than those of the English military schools, which 
are generally situated upon barren heaths like Sandhurst. 

The Royal Military College at Sandhurst is about as old an insti- 
tution as West Point, having been founded in 1799 ; it is controlled 
by a board of military officers of high rank, appointed by the Queen ; 
at the head of it is a Governor; it has also a Lieutenant-Governor, 
a Major, two Captains, and Civil Professors who teach mathematics, 
drawing, military surveying, the modern languages, the classics, and 
the art of fortification. 

The cadets are divided into seniors and juniors. There are but 
fifteen seniors, who are already commissioned officers in the Army, 
having served four years and exhibited high abilities. Unlike West 
Point, Sandhurst is self-supporting, its expenses of eighty-five thou- 
sand dollars a year being defrayed by the junior gentlemen cadets, 
one hundred and eighty in number. These junior cadets are either 
the sons of noblemen or the sons of officers, a few of whom pay 
nothing, being the children of distinguished military men who have 
died in distress. The cadets are admitted between the ages of thir- 
teen and fifteen years by nomination from the Governor of the col- 
lege to the Commander-in-chief. An aristocratic atmosphere sur- 
rounds Sandhurst, as it is the intention of the English government to 
keep the Army pretty well under the control of the upper classes, and 
fill it with the younger sons of noblemen. 

The Corps of Ro}^al Engineers is one of the most admirable organ- 
izations in the English Army ; it was for many years engaged in the 
survey of the entire United Kingdom ; to it is attached the Corps of 
vSappers and Miners ; most of the great fortifications in England and 
in the Colonies, such as the powerful fort at Point Levi, opposite 
Quebec, are executed by the Engineer Corps. 

In 1860 the English government spent ten millions of dollars in new 
45 



354 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

fortifications ; in 1861 eleven millions of dollars for the same object, 
and subsequently, down to 1866, ten millions of dollars more. At 
Portsmouth, which is one of the nearest seaports to London, eight 
millions of this money were expended, and at Plymouth, which is also 
on the southern coast of England, near Lands-End, one million and a 
half were also spent in fortifications ; at Gravesend, which lies on 
the Thames River, more than thirty miles below London, one million 
of dollars were expended ; at Pembroke, which lies at the southern 
tip of Wales, one million and a half were spent in sea walls ; at 
Dover, the nearest town to France, one million and a quarter were 
spent ; at Cork, where much of the American shipping enters, nearly 
three hundred thousand dollars were expended ; at Portland, which 
lies nearly opposite Cherbourg, the great French naval station, one 
million and a half were expended ; one million and a quarter of dol- 
lars were laid out on the forts of Sheerness, near the mouth of the 
Thames. 

During the same period we Americans have nearly lost our faith 
in mere walls of stone, believing iron-clad ships to be the only invul- 
nerable fortifications ; we continue work, however, on the powerful 
fort at Sandy Hook, at the entrance of New York harbor, and unto 
this day the great Stevens' Battery at Jersey City is undergoing con- 
struction, superintended by General George B. McClellan, one of our 
ablest military engineers. The Stevens' Battery was the conception 
and the undertaking of a private American citizen, — a fact which 
shows in a marked manner the power of our government to enlist the 
voluntary support of its citizens, and is also an evidence of the en- 
terprising character of the rich capitalists of New York. 

If the expectations of the contrivers of the Stevens' Battery be not 
too sanguine, it will be an invulnerable and perfect defence of the 
vast interests of New York, — a floating Cherbourg or Cronstadt 
steaming at will through the deep waters of New York Bay, and defy- 
ing the fleets of Europe to capture, for a second time, the city which 
was the seat of British occupation during nearly the whole of the 
Revolution. 

Chatham, to which reference has been made in the chapter on 
English Provinces, is the leading naval station at the mouth of the 
Thames, as is Fortress Monroe at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. 

The great event in the history of Chatham and its dockyard was 
the burning by the Dutch fleet of many English ships-of-war lying 
here in ordinary. On the 7th of June, 1667, De Ruyter, with a fleet 



THE BRITISH AND AMERICAN ARMY AND NAVY. 355 

of sixty ships of the line, anchored at the mouth of the Thames. The 
English vessels in that river had retired, and the Dutch Admiral ac- 
cordingly commenced operations in the Medway, first attacking the 
little fort at Sheerness, which was abandoned after a defence of an 
hour and a half. Although the preparations and object of the enemy 
had been long known, scarcely any defence had been organized. 
" The alarm," says Evelyn, " was so great that it put country and 
city into a panic, fear, and consternation, such as I hope I shall never 
see more ; everybody was flying, none knew why or whither. " After 
the fall of the fort the Zealand and Frieseland ships joined De 
Ruyter, whose fleet, now seventy-two ships of the line, blockaded the 
mouths of the two rivers. The attack on the ships at Chatham was 
made on the 12th of June. The English fleet lay between Gillingham 
and Chatham, — within the chain that at Gillingham Fort stretched 
across the river. Two large ships, the " Matthias " and " Charles 
V.," were placed as near this defence as posssible, so as to bring 
their broadsides to bear on the enemy. The chain, however, was 
speedily broken and the two guard-vessels set in flames by fire-ships. 
The next day, three eighty-gun ships, " the largest and most powerful 
of England," which lay off Upnor Castle, were also destroyed by 
the Dutch fire-ships. This disgrace was comparable to our feeling at 
the burning of Washington in 1814. 

The English consider their greatest naval station to be Portsmouth, 
on the coast, south of London. Portsmouth harbor more amply com* 
bines spaciousness with security than any other in the kingdom. 
Though less than a quarter of a mile wide at the narrowest part of 
its entrance, it gradually expands to an extreme breadth of about 
four miles, and has an extreme length of about four and a half miles. 
Its outline is varied by headlands and creeks, and it is so thoroughly 
landlocked that even during violent storms vessels ride here in per- 
fect security. Horsea, Pewit, and Whale Islands cover three small 
bays within the harbor ; but everywhere the waters are so free from 
impediment, that even a ship of the largest size may make sail in 
any state of the tide. The current of ebb, being much stronger than 
that of flood, prevents any serious accumulation of sand, and keeps 
the entrance free and open. Yet the depth of the channel at the 
mouth, in low-water spring tides, is only twelve and a half feet ; and 
the width at the same place, between the buoys, is only about ninety 
yards ; so that first-rate ships, or the large steam-packets of the 



356 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

Royal Steam Company, which draw seventeen feet of water, only oc- 
casionally can enter. 

English, and indeed European ports at -large, bear little comparison 
with those of the United States. There are probably no roads in the 
world superior to Hampton at Fort Monroe, and no ports outside of 
the American continent like those of New York and San Francisco. 

In Portsmouth lies the hulk of the ship " Victory/' in which Nelson 
died. 

Nelson is the greatest name in the British Navy, or, indeed, in the 
naval history of the world. In gallantry and the capacity to inspire 
courage, he reminds us somewhat of Decatur ; but his field was wider 
than Decatur's, although he was the American's inferior in coolness, 
discretion, dignity of character, and muscular power. Nelson re- 
marked of Decatur that his exploit in cutting the frigate Philadelphia 
out of Tripoli harbor was equal to any episode in naval history. 
Nelson, like Decatur, fought altogether in the era of sailing vessels. 
His father was a clergyman, and the young Nelson commanded a 
frigate during the American Revolution ; but it was during the Napo- 
leonic wars that he won immortal renown, by the victories of the Nile, 
Copenhagen, and Trafalgar ; at the former he almost annihilated the 
French fleet ; at Copenhagen, where he fought the Danes without a 
previous declaration of war, he refused to retire from action when his 
superior officer made the signal, but, putting his hand to his only re- 
maining eye, he looked at the discouraging flag with the blind socket 
of the other, and made illustrious the expression, " I don't see it ! " 

Fort hese two victories he was generously rewarded, and raised to the 
peerage ; but his wounds, his restless temperament, and his licentious- 
ness would have made his latter days wretched, but for his death in 
the hour of victory over the combined fleets of France and Spain at 
Trafalgar. 

Hearing that these fleets lay in the harbor of Toulon, he offered 
his service to the Admiralty, and for fourteen months never left his 
ship but three times, and never longer than one hour ; in a storm the 
enemy evaded him, when he cruised up and down the Mediterranean 
in search of them, went to the West Indies, to Ireland, along the 
Atlantic coast of Europe, but failed to discover them. Sick and 
spent, he returned to his home at Merton, near London, when sud- 
denly he was told that his adversaries had been seen in Cadiz harbor 
i outside of Gibraltar. He immediately started for Portsmouth, where 
he ordered his coffin to be embarked with him ; it had been con- 



THE BRITISH AND AMERICAN ARMY AND NAVY. 357 

structed out of the main-mast of a captured French ship-of-war, and 
he set sail amidst the greatest enthusiasm. Villeneuve, the French 
Admiral, was told in Cadiz-, by an American, that Nelson was wait- 
ing for him outside with his fleet just beyond the horizon ; this dis- 
turbing news was denied. On the 19th of October, 1805, the French 
fleet was seen coming out of Cadiz. They faced each other two days 
afterward, Villeneuve mustering forty sail-of-the-line and frigates ; 
Nelson thirty-one. Collingwood was Nelson's second in command, 
a noble and virtuous character, and they fired the first shot at noon. 
One hour and a quarter later a musket-ball struck Nelson's epaulette, 
and broke his spine. At half-past four o'clock, just after the last shots 
were fired, Nelson expired, and by that time the combined French and 
Spanish fleets were sunk, dispersed, or captured, the Spanish Admiral 
was mortally wounded, and Villeneuve a prisoner. The French Navy 
appeared no more upon the sea during the reign of Napoleon. 

Villeneuve was murdered in Paris, as he returned from captivity, 
while Nelson's memory was lavishly honored ; and when he was in- 
terred under St. Paul's Cathedral, the sailors who bore his coffin rent 
in pieces the flag which enclosed him and kept them for mementoes. 
His brother was made an Earl, and given thirty thousand dollars a 
year ; his sisters were presented with fifty thousand dollars each, and 
one hundred thousand was given them to buy an estate. But the 
earnest request which Nelson had made in his will, that his concubine, 
Lady Hamilton, should be maintained by the nation, could not be 
respected ; she died miserably. 

Far otherwise was Wellington honored when he returned to London 
after the battle of Waterloo. He had been absent from England five 
years. In his characteristic manner, he landed at Dover at the ear- 
liest possible moment, went straight to London, and walked into the 
House of Lords. He had left the country Sir Arthur Wellesley ; he 
returned a Duke. As soon as the sloop-of-war conveying him was 
seen off Dover, at five in the morning of the 28th of June, the 
sea and shore resounded with the salutes fired from the ships and 
from the cliffs. Multitudes came thronging to the landing-place ; and 
they carried the hero on their shoulders to his inn, amidst a roar of 
acclamation. That same evening, he was told by the Lord Chancel- 
lor, in the presence of a crowded House of Lords, that his was the 
only instance, in the history of the British Peerage, of an individual 
being, at his first entrance into that House, a Baron, a Viscount, an 



358 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

Earl, a Marquess, and a Duke, — each rank being won by distinct 
services to the country. 

Royal personages had had all the dignities heaped upon them by a 
single gift ; but no similar instance existed of rising by patriotic ser- 
vice through all the ranks, before taking a seat among the peers. 
Then followed city and royal banquets, given in his honor, at which 
the royal family were solicitous to pay their tribute of homage to one 
who stood high above the patronage of potentates. It was in May, 
while in Paris, that his highest title was conferred upon him ; and 
Parliament voted him two and a half millions of dollars, for the pur- 
chase of an estate and the support of his rank. An unprecedented 
offer of homage was made, in a resolution that a deputation from the 
House of Commons should wait on him, on his return, to congratulate 
and compliment him. Wellington, on being requested to appoint a 
time, begged leave rather to go himself, and pay his respects in per- 
son ; and he appeared in the middle of the House, in the afternoon of 
the 1st of July. His address was simple and earnest ; and it ended, 
like most of his public speeches, in a declaration that he was always 
ready for the service of his sovereign and his country. 

The French force on the field of Waterloo was about seventy-two 
thousand men ; the army under Wellington, sixt3'-eight thousand ; the 
Prussians bringing thirty-six thousand more in the evening. Napo- 
leon had two hundred and forty pieces of cannon ; Wellington, one 
hundred and eighty. The loss, in killed and wounded, of the Allies 
was nearly eleven thousand, besides six thousand Prussians. That 
of the French was forty thousand. 

The total armament of Julius Caesar, when he invaded Britain in 
cavalry and infantry, amounted to thirty-two thousand men, con- 
veyed across the channel in eight hundred first-class vessels. The 
number of vessels employed by William the Conqueror amounted to 
three thousand, but of which only between six hundred and seven 
hundred were of a superior construction. Supposing the Normans 
trebled in number that of the Romans, it must have fallen below one 
hundred thousand, or barely one-twentieth of the population of Eng- 
land. 

Until within a recent period of a few months, flogging has been a 
feature of the entire British service. 

u I have more than once heard it argued," says a British officer, 
" whether a strong man could bear more than nine hundred lashes, 
without being taken from the halberds. The punishment, too, did 



THE BRITISH AND AMERICAN ARMY AND NAVY. 359 

not necessarily cease when the delinquent's suffering overcame his 
physical endurance, and nature could bear no longer ; but if the 
entire sentence was not carried into execution the first time he was 
tied up, a second, and possibly a third, time, after allowing a sufficient 
interval for the cure of his back in the hospital, was he brought out to 
receive the residue. Thus as the first two hundred and fifty or three 
hundred lashes gave the greatest pain (after which the flesh becomes 
numbed to further blows) , the strong man took the whole of his pun- 
ishment at once, without, comparatively speaking, feeling the last 
half of it ; while the weaker man, though guilty of the same crime 
only as the strong one, was twice or thrice made to endure the acute 
torture attending the first strokes of a fresh flogging. In many regi- 
ments, too, it was the custom to flog by the tap of a drum, — that 
was, for a drummer to stand by and give the time to him who wielded 
the cat, by tapping on the drum-head with a single drumstick, at 
measured intervals of about two seconds. Sometimes these intervals 
were longer ; and I have heard of half-minute time being practised, 
though I never saw it, which must have prolonged the torture to a 
most unnecessarily cruel extent. Yet excess of punishment had by 
no means the desired effect of repressing crime ; the reverse was the 
fact. Flogging was too often witnessed to be greatly dreaded, and 
too indiscriminately inflicted to be considered at all degrading. The 
worst regiments in the service were those whose Colonels were 
too liberal of the lash ; and, on the contrary, the best were those 
w r here there was but little flogging." 

From this cruel infliction, Americans can understand why so many 
British sailors and soldiers have deserted to our milder service, and 
these desertions led to the assertion of the right of search which led 
to so many difficulties between America and England. 

Far different is the treatment of the common soldier by the United 
States. During the civil war our Sanitary and Christian Commissions 
were allowed free access to the soldiery, and beautiful and compas- 
sionate women, a republic of Florence Nightingales, brightened the 
battle-fields and the hospitals. 

The most remarkable scientific and philanthropic monument of any 
war is the Army and Navy Medical Museum at Washington, which 
occupies the sacred fane, formerly the theatre, where President Lin- 
coln was assassinated. 

The contents of the building are now of the aggregate reminder of 
the bruises, wounds, and agonies of the entire struggle for the Union. 



360 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

In the Army Medical Museum are deposited the names and casu- 
alties of every stricken soldier, and it is a perpetual miniature of 
that vast field of war, whose campaigns of beneficence followed hi 
the footsteps of its heroes, and death and mercy went hand in hand. 

Here are sixteen thousand volumes of hospital registers, forty-seven 
thousand burial records, two hundred and fifty thousand names of 
white, and twenty thousand names of colored, soldiers, who died in 
hospitals. Here are the names and cases of two hundred and ten 
thousand and twenty-seven men, besides, discharged from the army 
disabled. Here are names and statements of one hundred and thirty- 
three thousand nine hundred and fifty-seven wounded men brought to 
hospital, and the particulars of twenty-eight thousand four hundred 
and thirty-eight operations performed with the knife. Read over 
these figures again to get a conception of the infamy of war, and the 
heroism of man. In them the butchered hecatombs of bullocks and 
heifers slain for our appetites seem to find approximation. In one 
year, — so methodized and perfect are the rules and registers collected 
in this fire-proof building, — forty-nine thousand two hundred and 
twelve cases of men, widows, and orphans demanding pensions have 
been settled in this edifice. If you look through the lower floors, you 
will see a hundred clerks searching out these histories, cataloguing 
them, classifying them, bringing the history of the private soldier down 
to the reach of the most peremptory curiosity, and assisting to " heal 
the broken-hearted, and set at liberty them that are bruised." 

It is this museum which is at once the saddest memorial of the 
common soldier, and the noblest monument to the army surgeon. It 
contains a complete history of the surgery of the war, illustrated by 
casts, models, photographs, and preparations. There are here nine 
hundred medical pathological preparations, and two thousand eight 
hundred microscopical preparations. There is no similar Army 
Medical Museum in the world, and from Baron Larrey, down to 
Nelaton and Joubert, the published reports of this collection have de- 
lighted and surprised the savans of the world. Scarcely a leading 
surgeon in Europe but has written praises and sent them here. 

Among the curious facts shown here are these : the average life of 
an American is forty years, which is better than in Prussia, and cor- 
responds with the average in England, Wales, and France. The rate 
of mortality in America, in the working period of life (between 
fifteen and forty-five), is higher here than elsewhere in the world. 
Not so in childhood and advanced years, where the insurance offices 



THE BRITISH AND AMERICAN ARMY AND NAVY. 361 

seem to get the weather side of us. The mean age of a generation in 
America is between thirty-two and thirty-three years. The average 
age of all the soldiers of the late war was from twenty-three to 
twenty-six years ; so that the average soldier is scarcely eligible to 
the House of Representatives. This is a higher average than the 
Prussian soldiery, twenty-three and a half, or the British, twenty- 
three. The average heighth of American mmi is sixty-eight inches ; 
of recruits to the regular Army, sixty-nine inches ; of recruits to the 
volunteer Army, sixty-seven and a half inches. Forty-seven nation- 
alities fought on the Union side in this war, and the average of nearly 
three hundred and fifty thousand of them in height was sixty-six and 
three-quarter inches. So we are an inch and a half higher than 
British soldiers, and two and four-fifths higher than French. Average 
chest of American soldiers is thirty-five inches, of senators thirty- 
eight and a half ; so that a life-time of politics only blows one up 
three and a half inches. Minnesota had the tallest men in the army, 
and New Hampshire the shortest, — a singular fact against our tradi- 
tions. Kentuckians had the best chests, and Massachusetts men the 
smallest. Senators weigh on the average one hundred seventy-one 
and a half pounds, and soldiers one hundred forty-seven and a half. 

A million drafted men, examined and reported upon, show that we 
are the best fighting nationality in the world, and have no right to 
be excused in any considerable percentage. Only three in a thousand 
of us have not good patriotic chests, and four and a half per thousand 
of us are deaf. About two and one third in a thousand are near- 
sighted ; so that it is somewhat remarkable that so many e} T e-glasses 
are worn ; and the varicoceous people are even in smaller fraction. A 
club-foot is one in a thousand ; but imbecility, as all are aware, is 
more common, and goes two better. In Delaware and Missouri 
nobody much goes insane, but New Hampshire and Rhode Island 
stand well along, nearly three to the thousand. In Massachusetts, 
so itching is the temper of the people, nearly four in a thousand 
have skin diseases. Iowa and Kansas are exempted from vicious 
diseases, while the highest rate, thereof, was, of course, in the District 
of Columbia. Eighteen men to the thousand could not bite cartridges, 
though they were probably equal to beef-soup. 

To return to the Army and Navy. 

The total number of screw steamships afloat in the Navy of the 
United Kingdom is three hundred and forty-one ; building, twenty-one, 
46 



362 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

The total number of paddle steamships afloat is seventy-three ; building, 
one. The grand total of effective sailing-ships afloat is thirty-eight, 
and the grand total of steam and Bailing is four hundred and seventy- 
four. 

In 1861 the whole United States Navy consisted of forty-one men- 
of-war, chiefly sailing vessels. At the end of the war the Navy con- 
sisted of seventy-five monitors, four hundred and one screw or paddle 
steamers, and one hundred and twelve sailing-vessels, carrying in all 
four thousand four hundred and forty-three guns. In 1867, there 
were two thousand forty-eight officers, of all ranks, including one 
Admiral [Farragut], one Vice-Admiral, and twenty-seven Rear-Ad- 
mirals. There w T ere thirteen thousand six hundred men, and the 
naval expenditure, for the year ending June, 1867, was about forty- 
three and one half millions of dollars. We had eight dock-yards. In 
1867 the English Navy cost about fifty-five millions of dollars, and 
was composed of sixty thousand sailors and mariners. 

The number of first-class cadets admitted into the English Navy, 
in the year 1866, was one hundred and sixty. The Military Academy 
at West Point will be described in the probable chapter on the French 
Army. It is as beautifully situated as any castle on the Rhine. 

Scarcely less picturesque is the site of the United States Naval 
Academy, at Annapolis, on the beautiful sheet of water called Chesa- 
peake Bay, some forty miles from Washington. 

It takes two hours to make the trip, of which one hour is spent be- 
tween Washington and the place called Annapolis Junction, and 
another between the Junction and Annapolis. The Junction is a 
tavern, a station, and some woodsheds pitched in a piece of woods, 
near by which, on a plain, are uneasy indications of the impending 
birth of a town. The Annapolis road is not the property of the 
Baltimore and Ohio Company, and it is a profitable corporation. It 
traverses the ridge of the long and narrow neck between the Pa- 
tuxent and the Severn Rivers, a neck of glades, swamps, scrub-pine 
and sassafras timber, and silent remindings of a past agricultural 
vigor, sapped by tobacco and smitten by war. A half-dozen of stations, 
incomplete unless there be a tavern-bar somewhere around, stand at 
the crossings of desert roads, and all the way one sniffs the air of the 
salt bay and its back waters. The sky and the horizon grow cool 
and vague, and we see, or imagine, watery mirages in the air. An 
appetite for shell-fish is discovered coming to one, a suggestion of 
yellow perch, and insane cravings to wade along some shallow beach 



THE BRITISH AND AMERICAN ARMY AND NAVY. 363 

with an umbrella and a fishing-rod. By the time you have got the 
appetite very bad you are at Annapolis. A brief sketch of the town 
may serve to freshen up the duller routine of our statistics. 

From the venerable State House steeple I took this sketch of the 
old revolutionary city, in the summer of 1869 : — 

Not above half a mile from boundary to boundary, by any diameter, 
the snuggest of little cities sat, to the water's edge on three sides, 
upon a mound-like peninsula. At the top of the mound, in the 
middle of the town, was the State Capitol. Two wide salt coves, 
coming in from the Severn, approached each other, and by the narrow 
neck between them came in the railway and the common road. These 
broad coves widened and narrowed like a chain of miniature lakes, 
and lying, as they did, in the greenest of foliage, I likened them to 
the Lakes of Killarney. The peninsula of the city itself, and the bay 
of the Chesapeake and Severn into which it protruded, reminded me 
of Monaco, the little principality city, on the Mediterranean. The 
shape of the peninsula is a broad lance-head, pointing, not out toward 
the bay, but toward the opposite side of the Severn, which is here 
about a mile and a half wide. On the blunt point of the peninsula is 
the Naval Academy. At the outlet of the cove, to the right, is the 
Priests' College, occupying the mansion and homestead of Charles 
Carroll, of Carrollton. At the outlet of the cove, to the left, is St. 
John's College, the oldest continuous institution of Maryland. Be- 
hind the State Capitol is the parish church of St. Ann's. Facing the 
Chesapeake is the market and inlet. Two miles outside is the bay. 
These are the main features of the little city of Annapolis, whose 
natural position is one of the shrewdest pickings from nature. 

A series of green capes, golden-edged with beaches, introduce the 
bay. Behind the white light-house, on the further cape, and the 
light-ship moored upon the outer bar, one sees the blue-wooded line 
of Kent Island, the Plymouth Rock of Maryland, and the long, fruity 
peninsula of the Eastern Shore, that pleasant bar which keeps the 
Atlantic back from the noblest of our eastern estuaries. Far up and 
down this silent mirror of water the eye can ramble from spit to spit, 
from islet to island, guessing the mouths of many rivers, watching 
the tacking of pungies, and the steamers putting in at pleasant land- 
ings ; and at the piers of the Naval Academy, with their gay buntings 
spread and flowing, lie at their cables the school fleet, a little navy 
of itself. There, at the wharf, is the frigate Constitution, in which 
Hull, Bainbridge, and Stewart won redeeming honors in our second 



364 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

war. Beyond is the Macedonian, which Decatur took from the British 
off the Azores in the fall of 1812. There, also, are the Dale, the 
Savannah, and the Santee, such models of wooden ships as made the 
hearts of our fathers rise. Further in the channel is the yacht 
America, which outsailed the English Navy in a race, and then, as a 
blockade-runner, outsailed our steamers. All these constitute the 
school fleet, which is (May) within a couple of weeks to spread sail 
and take the midshipmen to some distant seas. 

President Polk established the Naval School at Annapolis in 1845 ; 
it includes about a hundred acres of ground, and its buildings are spa- 
cious and comfortable ; they surround a large square of green, open 
on the water side, and near by is a beautiful park for the entertain- 
ment of the cadets. Here, as at West Point, splendid balls are fre- 
quently given ; for, with all our republican jealousy of a standing 
Army, and a permanent Navy, the young officers of both services hold 
the highest rank in social life. 

Every year a number of eminent gentlemen are invited by the 
President of the United States (who has the appointment of a few 
cadets at large) to visit West Point and Annapolis, and report upon 
their condition ; the people are thus kept informed of affairs in 
these nurseries of our united services, and the public jealousy is al- 
layed. 

The Board of Visitors, for Annapolis, in 1869, expressed them- 
selves as delighted with the efficiency of the school : — 

"We doubt," they say, "if any institution in the world affords 
equal facilities for the theoretical and practical study of steam, and 
the steam-engine. There is, on shore, an edifice called the u steam 
building," in which a marine engine, complete in all its parts, even to 
the screw propellor, is kept ready for use, and open to the midship- 
men. The department is well supplied with models, and drawings, 
and contains boilers in several stages of construction. The text-book 
in use, in 1869, was ' Main Brown upon the Steam-Engine,' an 
English work, deficient in some respects, and erroneous in others. 
It contained no analysis of American coals, nor any table showing 
their relative efficiency. The dozen lines devoted to anthracite coal 
contain several inaccuracies. It had no list of our ships, and its long 
list of British ships contains the names of many that are not in the 
service, and its table of engines in ships makes no mention of the 
boilers attached, which are the real exponents of the power of the 
machine. Some capable officer could be selected to prepare a text- 



THE BRITISH AND AMERICAN ARMY AND NAVY. 365 

book on the subject, which would be very valuable, not only to the 
Academy, but to many other American schools. 

" The police of the grounds and buildings is admirable. Tobacco 
in every form and intoxicating liquors of every description are posi- 
tively forbidden. Regular instruction is given in dancing, boxing, 
and small and broad sword exercise, and all are required to submit to 
gymnastic training. Ball-playing and rowing are encouraged. The 
result of all this care is a remarkably fine physical development, with 
instances of superior gymnastic skill and strength, and a very satis- 
factory general condition of health. During the year 1869, out of 
nearly four hundred students and officers, there was only about two 
per cent, excused from duty by reason of ill-health." 

The amount of money expended, since the civil war, upon all 
buildings at Annapolis, including the wholly new, and the alterations, 
is about two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. 

At West Point and Annapolis the government has property worth 
not less than three millions of dollars. 

The school at Annapolis is unique and remarkable, amongst all the 
nations ; but West Point resembles, in many respects, the great mili- 
tary schools of Europe. 

The United States Navy is recruited by voluntary enlistments, 
while in France a naval conscription takes place in all the seaport 
towns, and in England the terrible press-gang formerly kidnapped 
watermen wherever they could find them. 

An English authority says, of the straits to which the British Navy. 
has been reduced by abandoning impressment, that in 1869, " in the 
absence of a compulsory conscription like that of France and Russia, 
our greatest difficulty had been in promptly increasing the regular 
Army by voluntary enlistment. It drove the government to the es- 
tablishing of recruiting depots on the continent, and in the colonies, 
and to the hire of the Turkish and Sardinian contingents. But these 
first obstructions had been surmounted, and in the spring of 1856, 
England was ready with an array of vastly augmented armaments, 
naval and military. She had begun the war with a nucleus of only 
ten thousand gallant men. It had been augmented to one hundred 
thousand, of which seventy thousand were in the Crimea, in reno- 
vated health, strength, and discipline, ready to open the campaign. 
Our ships-of-war, when hostilities commenced, only numbered two 
hundred and twelve ; when the war ended they numbered ^ve hun- 
dred and ninety. ' The trident of Neptune is the sceptre of the 



366 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

world/ and Queen Victoria certainly wielded it, when at the grand ma-' 
rine display, at Spithead, after the peace (April 23d), she reviewed a 
fleet extending twelve miles, mustering three thousand eight hundred 
guns, forty thousand men, moved by a steam power of thirty-three 
thousand seven hundred and twenty horses. It was science, riches, 
and the heart of the people in the cause that had extemporized this 
magnificent novel review." 

It was the scarcity of seamen to fight her battles during the Napo- 
leonic wars, which caused England to advance the arrogant doctrine 
of the right of search, which was one of the causes of the second 
American war. Almost within cannon sound of the Capitol, the 
frigate Chesapeake was boarded, members of her crew ironed, and 
carried away, and some of them were afterward hanged. This, and 
other outrages, led to the eloquent reproaches of Richard Rush : — 

"Men are the property of the nation. In every American face a 
part of our country's sovereignty is written. It is the living emblem 
— a thousand times more sacred than the nation's flag itself — of its 
character, its independence, and its rights. 

U4 But,' say the British, ; we want not your men; we want only 
our own. Prove that they are yours, and we will surrender them.' 
Baser outrage ! more insolent indignity ! that a free-born American 
must be made to prove his nativity to those who have previously vio- 
lated his liberty, else he is to be held forever as a slave ! That be- 
fore a British tribunal — a British boarding-officer — a free-born 
American must be made to seal up the vouchers of his lineage, to 
exhibit the records of his baptism and his birth, to establish the 
identity that binds him to his parents, to his blood, to his native land, 
by setting forth in odious detail his size, his age, the shape of his 
frame, whether his hair is long or cropped, his marks, like an ox or 
a horse of the manger, — that all this must be done, as the condition 
of his escape from the galling thraldom of a British ship ! " 

The United States possesses seventeen million dollars of can- 
non, shell, and ball, which are not in use. We rifle fewer cannon, 
in proportion, than either England or France. 

There are two steam rams in the British Navy, — the Scorpion and 
the Wivern, — both of which were built for the revolted government 
of the Southern States, during the American civil war. 

The swiftest vessel-of-war in the world is the American Steam 
Sloop Wampanoag. No approach to this vessel, either in speed, or 
economy of fuel, or length of .time of steaming at a high rate of 



THE BRITISH AND AMERICAN ARMY AND NAVY. 367 

speed has ever been made. The engineering journals of England 
have questioned the veracity of the captain, by inventing the state- 
ment that the speed was obtained by the assistance of sails, not 
knowing how else to account for it, and they declare the speed im- 
possible under any other circumstances. It is well known in Ameri- 
ca, that no canvas was carried, — in fact, could not be carried at the 
speed ; for when it was attempted to ascertain the vessel's speed, 
under steam and sail combined, the vessel's speed was so great, under 
steam alone, that the velocity of the wind was insufficient to add 
more power. 

The Wampanoag is three hundred and thirty-five feet long, forty- 
two feet in breadth, and she draws eighteen and and one-half feet of 
water. The fastest steamers in English waters are the British mail 
vessels, which ply between Holyhead and Dublin across the shortest 
breadth of the English Channel ; they were constructed under a guar- 
anty to run twenty miles an hour ; they are three hundred and 
twenty-seven feet long, thirty-five feet in breadth, and displace nine- 
teen hundred tons. The fastest of these mail steamers runs fourteen 
and one-half geographical miles an hour, or crosses the Channel in three 
hours and fifty-five minutes. The Wampanoag runs sixteen and 
three-fourths geographical miles an hour, and yet displaces four thou- 
sand two hundred and fifteen tons. The Wampanoag runs at double 
the speed of the English mail steamer in proportion of size of boiler 
to vessel ; it will thus be seen that the United States Govern- 
ment in the national navy-yards can construct swifter vessels than 
the best private ship-builders in England, whether on the Clyde, the 
Mersey, or the Thames, the Wampanoag being still a new vessel. 
Indeed, the hulls of United States ships and steamers have always 
been more beautiful and adapted to a higher rate of speed than those 
of any nation ; our clipper ships led the mercantile navy of the world 
in speed ; and the yacht America, which is now a part of the school 
fleet of the naval academy at Annapolis, carried off the honors over 
all England in English waters. The fastest merchant ocean steamer 
ever built was the Adriatic of the " Collins' Line." She was built for 
speed without regard to economy, and so completed the ruin of her 
owners. She is now the property of an English corporation. Her 
highest speed was less than sixteen miles, while the Wampanoag's 
was seventeen and three-quarter miles an hour. These results show 
that American naval constructors retain their superiority, notwith- 
standing the fact that we nave no steameis carrying the national 



368 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

flag on the Atlantic except those of the American Navy. The 
destruction caused by Southern privateers with the ungenerous aid 
of English ship-builders and English ports, drove all our better ships 
off the sea between the years 1861-5, or compelled their owners 
to sell them to foreign governments. 

Since the close of the war, the high tax upon all articles entering 
into the composition of a ship has made it unprofitable to build 
vessels in this country. Our exports as well as our imports are 
now chiefly in foreign bottoms. The carrying trade between the 
United States and Europe is almost literally in the hands of Europe- 
ans. Were it not for the few ships still employed in the China 
trade, and the stand we are making by the establishment of a line of 
steamers on the Pacific, the coastwise trade, which is retained by the 
exclusion of foreign competition, would seem to be about all that can, 
under existing legislation, be relied - upon for the employment of 
American shipping. This lamentable condition of things is justly 
a source of mortification to every American who remembers the past 
enterprise and beauty of our mercantile marine. The legislation of 
the country has recently been entirely in the interests of the manu- 
facturing classes. Europeans do no longer say " Who reads an 
American book?'' but, " Who sees an American ship?" This pros- 
tration of our marine is at this time to be especially deplored, in view 
of the magnificent opportunities opening to us on the Pacific Ocean, 
where we possess in a higher degree than any nation the confidence 
of the Oriental nations. Our ship-yards are going to decay, and we 
have not the privilege of importing the materials to construct ships, 
nor to buy foreign ships free of duty. At the same time we are im- 
porting immense quantities of trivial articles, which add nothing to 
our power and dignity of true enjoyment. The Secretary of the 
Treasury reported in 1869, that, two-thirds of the importations 
of the United States consist of articles which, in economical 
times, would be pronounced luxuries. The war and a redundant 
currency have brought about unexampled extravagance, which 
can only be satisfied by the most costly products of foreign 
countries. No exception could be taken to such importations 
if they were paid for in our own productions. This, unfortunate- 
ly is not the fact. They are annually swelling our foreign debt, 
without increasing our ability to pay it. There is no depart- 
ment of the government which is conducted with proper economy. 
The habits formed during the war are still strong, and will only yield 



THE BRITISH AND AMERICAN ARMY AND NAVY. 369 

to the requirements of inexorable law. History affords no parallel 
case of a nation so fond of the sea as the Americans, and with such 
a genius for building ships, which has yet discouraged its sailor boys 
so entirely, and so fully succeeded in legislating its flag off the ocean. 
We send our mail-bags to Glasgow, to Liverpool, to Southampton, 
to Bremen, to Hamburg, to Antwerp, and to Brest in foreign ships ; 
in foreign ships they return to us ; the coastwise trade is all that we 
keep, and even this reservation was thrown up to the commercial in- 
terests by a member of Congress from Pennsylvania, in 1868, while 
he asked for increased tariff for his manufactures. 

The most grievous feature of the decline of American commerce 
is, that it has discouraged our boys from going to sea, so that we 
can scarcely be said at present to have any native seafaring element ; 
our navy is mainly manned by foreigners and negroes, and the mari- 
time amusements which were formerly characteristic of the youth 
of all our cities are now almost entirely confined to New York city. 
The English, on the other hand, take every opportunity to encourage 
cruising, boating, and yachting, in order that the ancient naval spirit 
of their islands may never be broken nor weakened. There are some 
fifteen yacht clubs in England giving employment to over one thou- 
sand persons. The Royal Yacht Club numbers over two hundred 
and fifty members, the greater portion of whom are representative 
men in the Kingdom of Great Britain. Hon. Earl Vane is the Com- 
modore. Fifty-nine vessels, all told, including } r awls, cutters, schoon- 
ers, and steamers constitute this yacht club. 

The British Navy has a nomenclature mainly derived from mythol- 
ogy, from the names of the royal family, or from certain waspish 
and formidable qualities, natures, and elements. 

The American Navy was in great part baptized in honor of the 
beautiful Indian nomenclature of our streams and mountains, but in 
1869 a Mr. Borie, temporarily Secretar}^ of the Navy, adopted in bulk 
the copyright titles of a large number of British ships, at which the 
country's good taste and individuality was justly incensed. I append 
the names of the very largest vessels of the two navies. 



AMERICAN. 

Colorado, Screw-frigate, 3,425 tons, 
52 guns, some of them firing shot of 
2,206 pounds, or about the weight 
of 7 cook stoves. 
47 



BRITISH. 



Minotaur, 6,221 tons, screw, 1,350 
horse-power, 36 guns, 400 feet long, 
59 beam, iron-clad. 



370 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 



AMERICAN. 

Roanoke, 3-turreted monitor, 3,435 
tons, 615-in. pivot guns, 350 horse- 
power. 

New Ironsides, Iron-clad frigate, 
3,486 tons, 16 guns, 600 horse-pow- 
er. 



BRITISH. 

Black Prince, 6,109 tons, 41 guns, 
1,250 horse-power. 

Northumberland, 6,621 tons, 1,350 
horse-power, 2Q guns. 



Other names of British ships are Royal Alfred, Agincourt, JEtna, 
Eoyal Oak, and Viper. The iron-clad ram Dunderburg, formerly in 
our Navy, is now the largest iron-clad in the Navy of France, which 
purchased her for two millions of dollars ; she carries 16 guns, and 
has a burthen of 5,090 tons. 

In 1869 there were thirty armories and arsenals belonging to the 
United States, employing nearly sixteen hundred persons, of whom 
more than one-third were machinists and armorers. The combined 
monthly pay of all these persons was about ninety-four thousand 
dollars. In the same }^ear the Surgeon-General's department cost 
sixty-five thousand dollars. 

The great English musket and rifle factory at Enfield is modelled 
after our armory at Springfield. The American Arnvy is at present 
armed with the Springfield breech-loading rifle, which is pronounced 
a better weapon than either the Needle or Chassepot gun. 

A fine opportunity was afforded us of studying the relative merits 
of the French and British services during the Crimean War. While 
the British Navy acquitted itself with distinction, the organization 
and the handling of its Army were far inferior to the French, and 
the entire war upon the English side may be said to have been a 
tissue of disasters, while the French came out of it with glory at the 
crowning period of the siege of Sebastopol ; the French captured the 
Malakoff, the most powerful redoubt, while the English assault upon 
the Redan was attended with mortification and repulse. 

Russell, the "Times" correspondent was obliged to bear this testi- 
mony to the merits of the French : — 

" At five minutes before twelve o'clock, the French, like a swarm 
of bees, issued forth from their trenches close to the Malakoff, 
scrambled up its face, and were through the embrasures in the twink- 
ling of an eye. They crossed the seven metres of ground which 
separated them from the enemy at a few bounds ; they drifted as 
lightly and quickly as autumn leaves before the wind, battalion after 



THE BRITISH AND AMERICAN ARMY AND NAVY. 371 

battalion, into the embrasures, and in a minute or two after the head 
of their column issued from the ditch, the tri-color was floating over 
the KornilofF Bastion. The musketry was very feeble at first, — 
indeed, our allies took the Russians by surprise, and very few of the 
latter were in the MalakorT; but the} r soon recovered themselves, and 
from twelve o'clock till past seven in the evening the French had to 
meet and repulse the repeated attempts of the enemy to regain the 
work, when, weary of the fearful slaughter of his men, who lay in 
thousands over the exterior of the works, and despairing of success, 
the Muscovite General withdrew." 

The same author speaks thus of the failure at the Redan after the 
English were driven out : — 

" The scene in the ditch was appalling, although some of the 
officers have assured me that they and the men were laughing at the 
precipitation with which many brave and gallant fellows did not 
hesitate to plunge headlong upon the mass of bayonets, muskets, and 
sprawling soldiers, — the ladders were all knocked down or broken, 
so that it was difficult for the men to scale the other side, — and the 
dead, the dying, the wounded, and the uninjured were all lying in 
piles together. The Russians came out of the embrasures and plied 
them with stones, grape-shot, and the bayonet, till step by step, pelt- 
ing each other with huge stones, they retired, slipping and tumbling 
into the ditch, where many poor fellows were buried alive from the 
scarps giving way. Then came the fearful run for life or death, with 
men rolling over like rabbits, then tumbling into the English trench, 
' where the men lay four feet deep on each other." 

Captain George B. McClellan, an American officer, says that the 
failure of the English assault may be attributed partly to the fact 
that their advanced trenches were too small to accommodate the 
requisite force without confusion, in part to their not being pushed 
sufficiently near the Redan, but chiefly to that total absence of con- 
duct and skill in the arrangements for the assault, which left the 
storming party entirely without support. Had it been followed at 
once by strong reinforcements, it is almost certain that the English 
would have retained possession of the work. 

British criticism upon this war is of a very dolorous character. 
One authority mentions that " the natives preferred the French uniform 
to ours. In their sight there can be no more effeminate object than a 
warrior in a shell jacket, with closely shaven chin and lip, and 
cropped whiskers. He looks, in fact, like one of their dancing troops, 



372 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

and cuts a sorry figure beside a great Gaul in his blazing red panta- 
loons and padded frock, epaulettes, beard d'Afrique, and well-twisted 
moustache. The pashas think much of our men, but they are not 
struck with our officers. The French made an impression quite the 
reverse. The Turks could see nothing in the men, except that they 
thought the zouaves and chasseurs of the French dashing-looking 
fellows ; and they considered their officers superior to ours." 

For a fine piece of description, I instance a part of Russell's most 
famous letter upon the sailing of the British fleet up the Black Sea, 
at the commencement of the Crimean War : — 

" It was a vast armada. No pen could describe its effect upon the 
eye. Ere an hour had elapsed it had extended itself over half the 
circumference of the horizon. Possibly no expedition so complete 
and so terrible in its means of destruction, with such enormous pow- 
er in engines of war, and such capabilities of locomotion, was ever 
yet sent forth by any worldly power ; for the conjunction of such a 
corps d'elite — the whole disposable British army — with a fleet of 
such strength, and an artillery of unequalled range, had assuredly 
no parallel in history. Its speed was restricted to four miles and a 
half per hour, but with a favoring wind it was difficult to restrain the 
vessels to that rate, and the transports set no sail. 

a The French fleet was visible, across the whole diameter of the 
circle, — that is, they had a front of some eighteen miles broad, and 
gradually the irregular and broken lines tapered away till they were 
lost in little mounds and dots of smoke, denoting the position of the 
steamers far down below the horizon. The fleet, in five irregular and 
straggling lines, flanked by men-of-war, and war steamers, advanced 
slowly, filling the atmosphere with innumerable columns of smoke, 
which gradually flattened out into streaks, and joined the clouds, 
adding to the sombre appearance of this well-named ' Black ' Sea. 
The land was lost to view very speedily beneath the coal clouds and 
the steam clouds of the fleet, and, as we advanced, not an object was 
visible in the half of the great circle which lay before us, save the 
dark waves and the cold sky. 

" Not a bird flew, not a fish leaped, not a sail dotted the horizon. 
Behind us all was life and power, — vitality, force, and motion, — a 
strange scene in this so-called Russian Lake ! " 

The question is frequently asked, which nation would have the 
victory if England and America were at war. In such an event it is 
probable that there would be no victory, but only mutual disaster. 



THE BRITISH AND AMERICAN ARMY AND NAVY. 373 

The American volunteer soldier of the present generation has no su- 
perior in any land, either in military experience, in ability to endure 
fatigue, in intelligence, in versatility, or in bravery, and notwithstand- 
ing our commercial misfortunes, the American Navy may be said, at 
present, to be better than at any time in its history. When we in- 
vented the monitor, we demolished with her one turret the navies of 
the globe ; their wooden fleets fell to pieces, and they hastened, at 
vast expense, to rebuild them on American suggestions. We have no 
need to go to war with England, and we need have no fear of a for- 
eign nation invading us. De Tocqueville forty years ago spoke in 
this manner of our impregnable position : — 

" Placed in the centre of an immense continent, which offers a 
boundless field for human industry, the Union is almost as much in- 
sulated from the world as if its frontiers were girt by the ocean. 
Canada contains only a million of inhabitants, and its population is 
divided into two inimical nations. The rigor of the climate limits 
the extension of its territory, and shuts up its ports during the six 
months of winter. From Canada to the Gulf of Mexico a few sav- 
age tribes are to be met with, which retire, perishing in their retreat, 
before six thousand soldiers. To the South, the Union a point of 
contact with the Empire of Mexico ; and it is thence that serious hos- 
tilities may one day be expected to arise. But for a long while to 
come the uncivilized state of the Mexican community, the depravity 
of its morals, and its extreme poverty, will prevent that country from 
ranking high amongst nations. As for the powers of Europe, they 
are too distant to be formidable. 

44 The great advantage of the United States does not, then, consist 
in a Federal Constitution which allows them to carry on great wars, 
but in a geographical position which renders such enterprises extreme- 
ly improbable." 



CHAPTER XIV. 

BRITISH AND AMERICAN FINANCE. 

The national debts, revenues, and expenditures of the two countries; their prospects for 
solvency, and their different systems of money management. 

With a nation, as with a man, there can be no true independence, 
unless its credit be good, and its dealings just. It may be valorous 
as Paraguay, but who will lend it money unless it has thrift, resour- 
ces, and business honor? It may have the genius of Ireland, but the 
world will not respect it, if it is perpetually impoverished. All society, 
all government, turn upon money as the pivotal principle ; for it is 
the unit of prosperity, and with a modern state, even more than with 
an individual, is the vital element of greatness. With money laid up 
by the father of Frederick the Great, modern Prussia was enabled to 
take rank among the great powers. With money, England subsidized 
all Europe to make war upon France, and by her purse rather than by 
her sword, overthrew the greatest militaiy genius of history. In Eng- 
land, the management of the national finances has always been in- 
trusted to the most powerful statesman of his party ; but in America, we 
have always considered the management of foreign affairs to be the 
most honorable post in the Cabinet, until, when the civil war of 1861 
broke out, we learned for the first time that the exchequer was even 
more important than the map of the campaign. Within five years 
our public debt bounded from less than sixty-five millions to about 
two billions and eight hundred millions of dollars. From being the 
least involved of all great states, we found ourselves deeper in debt 
than any, except Great Britain. The national debt of the United 
States, on the 1st of July, 1869, was two billion four hundred and 
eighty-nine million two thousand four hundred and eighty-one dollars, 
having been reduced in four years, more than the English debt in fifty. 
The whole of this debt was incurred in the struggle to maintain our 
nationality intact. Little, or none of this mighty indebtedness was 
incurred in harassing our neighbors of other nations, in paying subsi- 
dies to the mercenaries and refugees of other Christian lands, or in 

374 




MONETARY INSTITUTIONS. 

1— The Bourse, Paris. 2— United States Treasury, Washington. 3— The Bourse, St. Peters 

burg. 4— The Royal Exchange, London. 



BRITISH AND AMERICAN FINANCE. 375 

jealous interferences with the regimen of our continent. A part of 
it was loaned for internal improvements ; the rest to save the repub- 
lic for posterity. After the Revolution, in 1789-91, the debt of the 
United States was about seventy-five and one-half millions ; by 1812 
it had declined to forty-five and one-fourth millions ; the second war 
with England brought it up to one hundred and twenty-seven and 
one-third millions by 1816 ; in 1836, this debt had been reduced to 
two hundred and ninety-one thousand dollars, or within the compass 
of a private citizen to pay it all without embarrassing himself; by 
1846 the debt had risen, through the purchase of territory, Indian 
Wars, etc., to sixteen and three-fourths millions, and at the end of 
the Mexican War, in 1849, it was sixty-four millions of dollars, or 
little more than half the annual interest upon our present public 
debt. Among the many considerations arising out of our embarrassed 
situation, the patriotic mind can take refuge in this,, that the interest 
of the cost incurred in war with a portion of our own nation was 
twice the whole principal of the cost incurred in war with the 
strongest power, next to ourselves, on the North American conti- 
nent. With the North and South united, the cost of warfare on this 
continent will always be petty compared with the expense of con- 
quering ourselves. Now let us see how the morality and extent of 
this account compares with that of our mother and rival. How did 
the British acquire their vast debt? 

In the year 1689 the whole British debt was three million three 
hundred thousand dollars. The nation had expelled its last tyrant, 
and bade fair to have a prosperous future, but the new King had a 
passion for war, and in a few years he had run up this debt seventy- 
five millions of dollars, — for what ? To maintain the balance of power 
on the Continent of Europe, where England had no possessions, but 
where this Dutch King had. 

Queen Anne must needs win great victories under Marlborough, 
and she added one hundred and ninety millions to the debt. 

When the American Revolution began, the whole debt of England 
was six hundred and forty-two millions of dollars ; to conquer Amer- 
ica, England doubled this debt in nine years. In the next nine years 
of peace, the debt was increased only twelve millions of dollars. 

Then commenced that fatal series of wars, in which England, in- 
stigated by aristocracy and envy, strove to suppress the French Re- 
public and France. 

At the end of those tremendous and illiberal efforts, the English 



376 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

debt had reached the monstrous figure of four billions and two hun- 
dred millions of dollars [4,200,000,000]. 

In fifty 3 r ears this English debt has been decreased only three hun- 
dred and thirteen millions of dollars. The Crimean War alone ran 
up this debt about one hundred and fifty millions. 

From 1793 down to 1814, England paid in subsidies alone two 
hundred and thirty-one million four hundred and forty-seven thousand 
two hundred and ninety-five dollars, most of it to worthless Bourbon 
princes, and semi-civilized adventurers and courtiers of Eastern 
Europe. 

The manner in which money was raised to meet the expenses of 
the American civil war attests at once the power and the weakness 
of our form of government. While the nation was rocking on the 
brink of ruin, and friends and enemies abroad alike gave up our 
cause, the people voluntarily came forward and took the bonds, — that 
was the power of the republic ! But as it was contrary to our 
cherished notions of a popular government to wrest such vast amounts 
of money from the people, we were compelled to offer larger rates of 
interest than any other great state, — that was the weakness of the 
republic in time of unexpected war. As a consequence, while our 
capital debt is only five-sevenths that of England, we pay from ten 
to fifteen millions more interest annually. American rates of per- 
centage were esteemed so high that in almost every town in Christen- 
dom there was some one who gladly became interested in our securi- 
ties. Prior to the war we solicited loans from Europe to carry on 
the great corporate enterprises endorsed by the several States of the 
Union, but at present there are thousands of Germans, Englishmen, 
and French, who hold, so to speak, mortgages upon our national life ; 
these had faith in the government to lend it of their savings, and it 
is just this part of our indebtedness which troubles us the most ; for 
to pay the interest on those foreign bonds we must ship large quan- 
tities of coin to Europe, which is lost to circulation here. America 
is no longer political and social authority only in the Old World, but 
its finances are consulted thrice every dsiy in every stock market in 
Europe ; the most interesting news which is transmitted by the 
cable is not the number of people at the Boston Music Jubilee, nor 
even the opening of the Pacific Railroad, but the regular monthly 
statement of the public debt. We have passed out of the boyish 
time of national life, when we are esteemed by our genius, our 
cheerfulness, or courage ; we have come to man's estate, with the 



BRITISH AND AMERICAN FINANCE. 377 

burden of our past struggles to carry, our business responsibilities to 
meet, and our solvency to be vindicated for the honor of ourselves, 
and the capital of our children. The past history of our Union has 
been touching and resplendent with single episodes ; we have given 
promise of much ; we have attracted many poor and prudent Euro- 
peans to share our citizenship ; but it is part of our destiny, our lot 
amongst the nations, the necessity of the state, as of mankind, to hold 
up our faith by our sacrifices, or otherwise be rejected from the front 
rank of creditable nations, all of whom tread the same embarrassed 
path. It must be confessed that in financial matters we are not con- 
sidered abroad to be beyond criticism for the wisdom of our admin- 
istration thereof. As in private life the last test of confidence is to 
loan one money, so in national life the last evidence of wisdom is to 
know how far to put the state in debt, and how well to recover it to 
independence. 

Two men will always be mentioned with prominence in connection 
with American finance : Salmon P. Chase and Jay Cooke ; — the first, 
as the contriver of our present monetary system, and the latter as 
the practical banker who popularized it. Mr. Chase's first loan was 
for eight million dollars, at twenty years, at six per cent. ; the capital- 
ists came forward with twenty-seven million dollars. When upwards 
of twenty-one million dollars had been borrowed from the banks, 
Congress authorized a loan, and at last passed a National Banking 
Act, providing for a system of National Banks, based upon govern- 
ment securities ; this system has well-nigh superseded the State and 
local banks of America, so that we may be said to have partially re- 
turned to the banking system which President Jackson broke up in 
1833. 

The Chase banking system may be said to be as follows : Capital- 
ists buy United States bonds and deposit them with the Treasurer 
of the United States, for which they receive not exceeding ninety 
per cent, in national bank-notes, whereby they are authorized and 
enabled to commence the business of banking. They receive six per 
cent, interest in gold on the amount of bonds purchased and de- 
posited. As to the permanent efficiency and economy of the Chase 
banking system, great difference of opinion exists, and in a merely 
descriptive book of this kind it is impolitic to take issue thereon. 
The subject of finance is more imperfectly understood with us than 
almost any other. Multitudes of speeches have been made pro and 
ccm, and the majority of our people seem to think that we can meet 
48 



378 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

the burdens of a great debt by some such patent-right contrivances 
as have made us eminent in mechanics. A French critic has ex- 
pressed it by saying that we have no financiers, but only a great many 
financial inventors. Mr. Hugh McCulloch, Secretary of the Treasury 
in 1869, thus expressed himself on the banking question : — 

" In no other country was so large a capital ever invested in bank- 
ing under a single system, as is now invested in the national banks ; 
never before were the interests of a people so interwoven with a 
system of banking, as are the interests of the people of the United 
States with their national banking system. It is not strange, there- 
fore, that the condition and management of the national banks should 
be, to them and to their representatives, a matter of the deepest con- 
cern. That the national banking system is a perfect one, is not as- 
serted by its friends ; that it is a very decided improvement, as far as 
circulation is regarded, upon the systems which it has superseded, 
must be admitted by its opponents." 

In the admirable preface with which Harriet Martineau introduced 
the American edition of her history, she probably came as near the 
representative expression of English financiers, as any authority 
that I might quote. " There is the vital subject of the currency," 
she says, " which it concerns every republican citizen, at all times, 
to attend to, when there is a danger (and there always is a danger) of 
a too free resort to paper money for relief from any embarrassment. 

" It seems to me that ho thoughtful citizen of any nation can read 
the story of the years before and after Peel's Bill of 1819, extending 
over the crash of 1825-6, without the strongest desire that such risks 
and calamities may be avoided in his own country, at any sacrifice. 
There are several countries under the doom of retribution for the 
license of an inconvertible paper currency ; and of these the United 
States is unhappily one. This passage of English history may 
possibly help to check the levity with which the inevitable ' crash ' is 
spoken of by some who little dream what the horrors and griefs of 
such a convulsion are. It may do more, if it should convince any 
considerable number of observers that the affairs of the economic 
world are as truly and certainly under the control of natural laws 
as the world of matter without, and that of the mind within." 

The centre of gravity of the English state government, like ours, 
lies in its financial system ; the administration of the revenues per- 
taining to the state alone, without any co-operation on the part of 
local governing bodies. "Municipal" taxation is wholly distinct ; 



BRITISH AND AMERICAN FINANCE. 379 

the state deriving nothing therefor ; the coffers of the state, how- 
ever, often afford aid for municipal purposes. The Prime Minister 
is generally the first Lord of the Treasury, and under him comes the 
Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is real Secretary of the Treasury. 
Exchequer is a word derived from the checkered table-cloth over which 
the Norman kings and their clerks managed the revenue. As the 
Chancellor has to propose to Parliament the estimated expenses, or 
" Budget " of the State, he must be a commoner, for the House of Com- 
mons has exclusive legislation over raising revenue. Three junior 
Lords, one for each kingdom, constitute the commission of the Treasury. 

The great branches of income flowing into the Treasury are paid 
into the public account at the Bank of England, with the authority 
of the Comptroller-General of the Exchequer, by the departments at 
which they are collected ; and all payments on the public account are 
made pursuant to the warrant or order of the Board of Treasury ; 
those relating to the larger items of expenditure, specially voted or 
sanctioned by Parliament, are made by the Comptroller-General ; and 
all the civil salaries, allowances, and incidental charges, which were 
formerly paid at the Exchequer, are now paid by the Paymaster-Gen- 
eral, upon special authorities from the Treasury, by drafts on the 
Bank of England. No moneys voted by Parliament can be drawn 
from the Exchequer without the warrant of the Treasury Board, 
nor can any payment be made from the Civil List without the same 
authority. 

The " Budget " is the expenditure, as annually estimated by the 
Chancellor of the Exchequer ; being only granted for one year, it 
necessitates the annual assembling of Parliament. From the time 
of Charles II., it has become the usage to grant supplies to the crown 
only for specified purposes. Clarendon styled this " a republican in- 
novation." In war times an extraordinary credit is usually granted 
to the crown, enabling it to prosecute the war even during the recess. 
Ministers who, like Pitt, can reckon upon a majority in the lower 
house, have even emancipated themselves from all granting by Parlia- 
ment. In 1797, without the cognizance of the Commons, he granted 
to the Emperor of Germany, by way of subsidy, six millions of dol- 
lars, and to the Prince of Conde, one million dollars. A large ma- 
jority in the Commons subsequently sanctioned this unconstitutional 
mode of procedure as having been compelled by urgent necessity. 
In like manner, the Parliament, in 1859, sanctioned many millions' 
excess of expenditure on the Budget of 1857. 



380 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

The Parliamentary Committee of Ways and Means is charged with 
examining the measures which the Chancellor of the Exchequer deems 
necessary to cover the state expenditure. 

The Committee of Supplies is charged with settling the amount of 
the government requirements in the respective departments ; its reso- 
lutions are introduced at the end of the session by the " Consolidated 
Fund Appropriation Bill," whereby the government is authorized to 
expend, for the purposes specified in the bill, the several amounts 
granted in Committee of Ways and Means. 

The Bank of England was first incorporated in 1694, with a capital 
of six millions of dollars, the whole of which was lent to the govern- 
ment. Its charter has been renewed from time to time. The profits 
of the corporation arise principally from its transactions as bankers, 
its discounts and money dealings, from the large balances of the 
public moneys in its hands, from the interest of three per cent, on 
the fifty-five million and seventy-five thousand dollars invested as a 
permanent loan to the government, redeemable on the termination of 
the charter, and from the remuneration made by the government for 
the trouble and expense of managing the payment of dividends and 
the transfer of stock ; for this latter duty the corporation is paid by 
a percentage, upon which a reduction was made in 1834, and a fur- 
ther reduction in 1844, in consideration of a release from stamp- 
duties (which amounted to about three hundred and fifty thousand 
dollars per annum), and the amount now actually paid by the public 
is about five hundred thousand dollars yearly. On an average of ten 
years the losses from forgery cost the bank two hundred thousand 
dollars of this sum. 

This bank corporation has recently established branch banks of 
deposit and issue at the following large provincial towns. These 
banks open accounts with individuals on the approval of the corpo- 
ration, and, by offering a place of secure deposit and increased facil- 
ities of discount, promote the interests of the merchants and traders 
in their locality. They also receive dividends and effect purchases 
or sales in the funds : — 



Manchester, 


Birmingham, 


Leeds, 


Liverpool, 


Swansea, 


Leicester, 


Bristol, 


Newcastle-on-Tyne, 


Norwich, 


Portsmouth, 


Plymouth. 





The Bank of England is am institution almost precisely like the old 



v. BKITISH AND AMERICAN FINANCE. 381 

United States Bank, which Andrew Jackson suppressed ; it was 
founded by a Scotchman more than two hundred years ago, and, 
according to his will, no Scotchman can be a Director in it. It is 
managed by a Governor, Deput} r -Governor, and twenty-four Direc- 
tors, eight of whom go out every year, and all of them must be 
Stockholders. 

It pays seven per cent, dividend annually, and employs nine hun- 
dred persons, whose combined salaries are about one million and fifty 
thousand dollars a year. 

Its bank-note circulation is upwards of ninety millions of dollars ; 
there are about two hundred and eighty-four thousand stockholders ; 
and eighty-six millions of dollars in bullion lie in the vaults. 

The building covers four acres, and is situated in the heart of Old 
London ; it is a copy of a Roman temple. 

The Directors meet in a spacious parlor. The machinery for 
weighing sovereigns throws pieces of full weight into one box, and 
rejects those of light weight into another ; ten of these machines 
have almost human intelligence, and weigh seventy thousand sover- 
eigns a day. 

When we consider the mighty power of this Bank of England, our 
thoughts revert to that other institution, which so warmly enlisted the 
support of Henry Clay and the American Whig Party, now standing 
in solemn majesty, in the heart of " Old Philadelphia," degraded to a 
mere Custom House, and thus described by Mr. Dickens : — 

" Looking out of my chamber window before going to bed, I saw, 
on the opposite side of the way, a handsome building of white mar- 
ble, which had a mournful, ghost-like aspect, dreary to behold. I 
attributed this to the sombre influence of the night, and on rising in 
the morning looked out again, expecting to see its steps and portico 
thronged with groups of people passing in and out. The door was 
still tight shut however ; the same cold, cheerless air prevailed ; 
and the building looked as if the marble statue of Don Guzman 
could alone have any business to transact within its gloomy walls. 
I hastened to inquire its name and purpose, and then my surprise 
vanished. It was the tomb of many fortunes, the great catacomb of 
investment, — the United States Bank." 

It is not improbable that the Bank of England is also destined to 
be deserted sooner or later. Mr. Robert Lowe, an able member of 
the English Cabinet, gave notice of some such intention in the 
summer of 1869. 



382 THE NEW WORLD COMPAKED WITH THE OLD. 

" The Bank of England system/' says Mr. John D. Watson, " largely 
permeates the financial, industrial, and even the social relations of 
that country, and has a potency compared with which the enormous 
power of the old Bank of the United States was as nothing. But 
there is a deep and increasing feeling of opposition to the bank in 
English financial circles. It is objected, and with good reason, that 
its management is illiberal and narrow ; that it fails to keep pace 
with the progress of commercial enterprise, and that its whole policy 
seems to consist in embarrassing trade by making money artificially 
dear at the very time when it should be cheap, and cheap at the time 
when it should be dear. It deals with gold at one time as a mere 
commodity, and at other times as money, and seems to be only influ- 
enced by the one idea of retaining a certain quantity of it in England, 
irrespective of the true interests of the business community. In 
fine, it is now claimed that the time has arrived for establishing free 
trade in money and in banking, the same as in other departments of 
business." 

The Bank of England is the principal bank of deposit and issue, 
and the most extensive in Europe, both in its capital and its money 
transactions. It enjoys exclusive privileges of banking, wiiich, so 
far as they may be considered monopolies, may be justified by the 
advantages and safeguards which the corporation affords to the 
public. The promissory notes issued by the Bank are declared a 
legal tender, but by an act passed in 1819 the bank and its branch 
establishments are compelled to change its notes for gold on demand. 
The corporation is restricted from engaging in any commercial under- 
taking other than dealing in bills of exchange and in gold and silver, 
and in advancing money at interest upon valuable securities. 

As connected with the state, the corporation transacts the whole 
of the banking business of the government ; it has the management 
of the public debt, receiving and paying the chief part of the annui- 
ties due to the public creditors ; it gives circulation to the Exchequer 
bills, and makes advances upon them for the public service, and 
also upon the prospective produce of certain branches of the revenue. 
It is the banker of the Treasury, the public balances being in its 
hands. For individuals, the corporation also acts as an ordinary 
bank of deposit, and makes advances to its depositors, but chiefly in 
times of difficulty, when extraordinary discounts are required to sus- 
tain mercantile credit. 

In place of the old United States Bank, the American edifice under 



BRITISH AND AMERICAN FINANCE. 383 

which the great transactions of our government are guarded, is the 
Treasury building at Washington. The entire structure of the 
American Treasury covers an area of five hundred and twenty 
by two hundred and seventy-eight feet, including two large courts. 
The Grecian Ionic order of architecture has been adopted, but it has 
been treated in many respects as a Roman order, being mounted on 
a podium or basement, crowned with an elegant balustrade. On the 
eastern side of the building is a colonnade composed of thirty pillars, 
extending a distance of three hundred and thirty-six feet north and 
south. On each of the other sides is a portico surrounded by a pedi- 
ment. Each shaft of the columns of the porticoes is a single block 
of stone thirty-two feet in height and four feet six inches in 
diameter. The buttress caps, which partially include the steps of the 
porticoes, are single slabs of granite, each twenty feet square by two 
feet in thickness. The granite used in the construction of this build- 
ing was quarried on Dix's Island, off the coast of Maine, and 
brought hither at great expense. Most of the larger slabs were cut 
after their arrival in Washington, as the risk of transporting them in 
a rough state was much less than if the stone had been dressed. 
Fronting the north entrance is a large fountain, the central base of 
which is twelve feet in diameter, and five feet high, and was cut from 
a single block of granite. The wing is sixty-five by one hundred 
and ninety-five feet, with a slight projection at the front and rear. 

The vault resembles a huge safe without shelves or drawers . It is 
composed of five thicknesses of metal, two of which are of the very 
best case-hardened, spring steel. The size of the vault is thirteen 
feet wide, thirteen high, and eighteen long, and it is secured by two 
massive doors, furnished with combination locks of the latest 
approved patterns. 

Independent of the national banking system, the treasury is the 
head-quarters of all the great monetary operations of the govern- 
ment. Here is paid interest upon the public debt ; here are received 
the immense collections from duties on imports, and receipts from the 
internal revenue ; here have been printed, recorded, and issued, the 
bonds, legal-tender notes, and fractional currenc} r of the United 
States ; here have been deposited hundreds of thousands of dollars 
arising out of the sale of cotton captured during the civil war ; here 
may be seen valuables found by the armies in their destructive 
marches through the South, as well as the remnant of the gold and 
silver coin taken from Jefferson Davis ; here, also, the United States 



384: THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

issues and guarantees the bonds of the Pacific and other railways 
subsidized by Congress. 

While the Treasury is the centre of national business, the various 
mints at Philadelphia, San Francisco, New York, and Denver are 
engaged in coinage to the amount of millions of dollars every year. 
The Philadelphia Mint is surpassed by none in the world for the ex- 
cellence of its machinery, and the beauty of its work. The U. S. 
Assay Office is in the Sub-Treasury, in New York, a grand building, 
which cost nearly one and a quarter millions of dollars. 

The total amount of gold that was found and coined in the United 
States, east of the Mississippi River, from the earliest times up to 
the 30th of June, 18G8, was nineteen million seven hundred and 
twenty-one thousand four hundred and twenty-five dollars. The total 
amount of gold found in all America, between its discovery and 18G8, 
w r as nine billion one hundred and seven million seven hundred and 
twenty-five thousand eight hundred and eighty-nine dollars, while all 
Europe, Russia in Asia, and the Australasian Islands, including Aus- 
tralia, produced but two billion seven hundred and seventy-six mil- 
lion one hundred thousand dollars in the same time. Counting the 
American national debt as coin, it would take one-fourth of all the 
gold mined on the hemisphere to pay it off; but General Grant said 
in his inaugural, that it was to this " strong box" of nature that he 
looked for relief. When America was discovered, there were but 
sixty millions of gold in Europe, and one hundred and forty millions 
in silver. California and the territories round her have produced 
one thousand millions of dollars in gold in twenty years. Humboldt 
and Chevalier estimate the yield of Mexico, in silver and gold, to have 
been, since the Conquest, three billion two hundred and thirty million 
dollars. In the same time Peru and Bolivia together have produced 
two billion seven hundred and forty-five million two hundred and 
twent}^-one thousand six hundred and forty-five dollars. Sixty-one 
million dollars was the largest annual annual gold yield ever made in 
Australia. California has several times produced ninety millions of 
gold a year. 

The English Mint is situated close by the Tower of London, four 
or five miles from the Treasury Building. The Chief of the Mint is 
called the " Master ; " his salary is seven thousand five hundred dol- 
lars a year. Sir Isaac Newton, and Sir John Herschel have filled 
this office, which is not a partisan one. The machinery is very intri- 
cate ; the dies are hardened by a secret chemical process. 



BRITISH AND AMERICAN FINANCE. 385 

The great private mart of America for loans and banking is 
Wall Street, New York, which is in communication with Washington 
by a multitude of wires, and every operation of the government 
is watched by determined assiduity and cunning. 

The London Ro} r al Exchange, described, in part, in the first chapter 
of this book, is managed by a committee of nine members, the chair- 
man of which is generally a member of Parliament ; there are about 
nineteen hundred members and subscribers, and the expenses are 
fifty thousand dollars a year. Upstairs are Lloyd's Subscription 
Rooms. The great business is done here on Tuesday and Friday, 
late in the afternoon, in a large open court, or quadrangle, ornament- 
ed with statues. Here, standing against the several pillars, one can 
see the Rothschilds, the Browns, the Barings, and all the great 
representatives of money. 

The London Stock Exchange, the greatest ready-money mart of 
the world, stands opposite the Bank of England. It has about eight 
hundred and fifty members, all of whom must be re-elected every 
year in committee of thirty. Fifty dollars is the } T early due. Stran- 
gers are not admitted, and, if discovered, are rigidly expelled. Bank- 
rupts can never be readmitted until they have paid about thirty cents 
on the dollar. Foreigners must have resided in London five }^ears to 
be eligible for membership, and forty-five hundred dollars' security 
must be entered for ever} T new member. The broker's commission on 
home securities is one-eighth per cent. 

The greatest case of "bulling and bearing" ever known in the 
London Stock Market was in 1814, when a person, in a nondescript 
uniform, appeared at Dover, opposite the French coast, and another 
at Northfleet, both having French money and anxious looks, and both 
declared that they were going with all speed to London to announce 
the death of Napoleon Bonaparte. The allies of these false witness- 
es in the Stock Exchange made all the splutter and excitement they 
could over this news, but Parliament and the Courts of Law took 
prompt cognizance of the crime, and found that at the head of it was 
Lord Cochrane, an ex-Admiral in the British Navy, a member of the 
House of Commons, and an active nobleman. He was condemned to 
a year's imprisonment, a fine of five thousand dollars, and to stand 
in the pillory. His professional career was stopped for a quarter of 
a century, and he was expelled from Parliament. This officer had 
captured Mobile in our late war ; he made heroic efforts to 
raise his character to honor again, commanded the fleets of Chilian 
49 



386 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

and of Greek independence, and was at last ennobled under another 
title, Lord Dimdonald. 

There is scarcely a foreign government debt, scarcely a European 
railway, mine, navigation, or trading company, that is not daily dealt 
in in London. But not only is London the financial centre of all 
European joint stock enterprises, but it is so likewise of those of 
almost every country on the American Continent. 

A membership of the New York Stock Exchange is property, now 
worth seven thousand dollars, — that is, by purchase from a retiring 
member. The initiation fee, without purchase, is limited to ten thou- 
sand dollars. The number of members will probably be limited, so 
that in future the value of the seat may be considerably increased. 
The most extraordinary attempt ever made in America to affect the 
stock and gold market was in the midst of the civil war, when a 
startling proclamation appeared in the New York papers, signed 
" Abraham Lincoln," decrying the war as a failure, and ordering out 
a large levy of men. It was presently discovered to be a forgery, 
and was traced to a young man named Howard, a journalist, who 
had been made the instrument of Wall Street gamesters, and whose 
occupation gave him knowledge of the great news combination called 
the Associated Press. He was promptly arrested, and sent to a mil- 
itary fort in the harbor of New York, where he remained many 
months. His poverty, and the escape of his instigators, excited sym- 
pathy after a time, and by the exertions of Rev. Henry Ward Beecher 
and others he was released on parole. 

It is not disputed that scandalous advantage was taken of the 
American government by its own officials, in the Treasuiy, as well as 
by outside operators during its time of trial, and subsequent to the 
war. Punishments in this country for offences -against the state have 
always been lightly inflicted, and in the change of parties the public 
enemy is generally pardoned, but under the stern and relentless gov- 
ernment of England, there is no offence like that against the state ! 
Smuggling is not a mere misdemeanor, punishable with forfeiture as 
here, but a high crime ! Ever} r headland of the United Kingdom is 
patrolled by coast guards, day and night. The inevitable sailor, with 
the telescope under his arm, keeps a look-out on every sail. Illicit 
stills are pursued into Irish and Scotch fastnesses, and vengeance 
without remorse is dealt out to the most trifling offender. 

The Lighthouse, and Coast Survey Bureaux, as well as the Revenue 
Cutter Service, arc, in America, in charge of the Treasury Department. 



BRITISH AND AMERICAN FINANCE. 387 

The United States Revenue Cutter Service comprises twenty-five 
steamers, and seventeen sailing vessels. Of the six steamers on the 
lakes, all but one are at present (1869) out of commission, or not in 
use. 

The United States attempted to organize a survey of its coasts in 
1807, but did not really begin to accomplish anything before 1832. 
Our coasts and bays are surveyed in the same manner as the public 
lands. A Swiss mathematician, F. R. Hassler, managed the coast 
survey for eleven years, and he was succeeded by A. D. Bache, a 
descendant of Benjamin Franklin. The first base line for survey was 
measured by Hassler, on Fire Island beach, outside of New York 
harbor. France and England preceded us in establishing Hydro- 
graphic Bureaux. Before the coast survey was organized a private 
surveyor, Edmund M. Blunt, undertook to prepare charts of impor- 
tant harbors and waters at his own expense, and the " American 
Coast Pilot/' prepared by the Blunt family, had become a book of 
nine hundred and twenty-six pages in 1867, 

The American Light-house Board was organized in 1852 after Eng- 
land and France had set the example. Our light-houses were miserable 
until we adopted the French system of lighting. We actually sub- 
jected our vessels to the dangers of running aground on imperfectly 
lighted coasts, rather than import the Fresnel light from France ; 
this might be called Protection to Shipwreck. Commodore M. C. 
Perry ordered the first Fresnel lights for trial, and they were placed 
on the Highlands of Neversink, New York harbor. Many anec- 
dotes might be told of the difficulties which philanthropic men have 
had to impress upon Congress the necessity of these great public 
labors. Some years since there was an endeavor made to get a light- 
house placed on the Execution Rocks, a reef, one short mile north of 
Sands Point, in Long Island Sound, but it did not succeed, although 
asked for by a large commercial interest, until the steamboat on 
which there was a member of Congress, on his way to Washington, 
struck on these rocks, immediately after which an appropriation was 
made for the building of a light-house at this place. 

In 1852, the bill for creating the Light-house Board was pending 
in Congress, but, being opposed by parties interested in keeping up 
our bad system, its passage was doubtful. The Baltic steamer was 
then at Washington, and sailed for New York. Off Sandy Hook she 
was detained by a fog, and could not run for want of proper buoys. 
A meeting of the passengers, among whom were several members of 



388 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

Congress, was called on board, and their attention particularly 
directed to this defect, and, on their returning to Washington, they 
caused the above-named bill to be passed. Punch says, to make 
railroad travelling safe, put a director on the locomotive. To get 
a bill through Congress, let the members see the necessity practi- 
cally. ' 

We had, in 1866, four hundred and thirty-one light-houses, all of 
which have lenses. We have a few reflector lights, but they are 
range lights, not included in the four hundred and thirty-one. 

If the four hundred and thirty-one houses were fitted with reflect- 
ors, to correspond in power with the lenses, they would consume 
about one hundred and sixty thousand gallons of oil annually. The 
consumption of the lenses is sixty-five thousand, with greatly in- 
creased light. 

The number of light-stations extinguished in the civil war was one 
hundred and thirty-five ; eighty of which have been restored. The 
work of restoration is going on. 

The Drummond light was invented by Lieutenant Drummond, of 
the British Army, more than thirty years ago ; he was engaged in 
making a survey of Ireland, and wishing to get as long a base as 
possible for his triangle, he endeavored to establish signals between 
two distant mountains, and in this endeavor he invented the Drum- 
mond light. 

Every energy of the English government is bent toward increasing 
its commerce ; for manufactures readily follow if there be buyers in 
foreign parts, and cheap and plentiful ships to transport the goods ; 
to this end harbor and pilot duties are kept down to the lowest figure ; 
while our government has done little of late toward encouraging our 
merchant marine. 

The New Orleans charges for bringing in and towing out a ship 
of a thousand tons amount to over 2,500 dollars ; those of New York, 
to about 676 dollars ; and those of Boston, to about 569 dollars. 
The lowest of these figures would be extravagant in England. 

In inland improvements, the United States compares well with 
England, both in the extent and cheapness of its canal and railway 
system, which, however, is not subordinate to the general government 
as in Europe. 

The cost of the 14,247 miles of railroad existing in 1867 in England 
was nearly 2,500,000,000 dollars, while the 39,276 miles of the same 
year in the United States cost only 1,700,000 dollars. The English 



BRITISH AND AMERICAN FINANCE. 380 

roads earned less than eight per cent, on the cost, while in the United 
States the earnings were nearly twenty-five per cent. ; but the net 
earnings of the English roads are fully one-half of the gross receipts, 
while on our roads they are less than one-third, being not more than 
thirty per cent. Much of this difference arises from the high price 
of materials under the tariff. The various items of cost per train 
mileage of running trains upon the railroads of the State of New 
York, amount in the aggregate to one hundred and sixty-six dollars, 
while in Great Britain they are but sixty-one dollars and thirty-seven 
cents. 

There were in operation in all the States, on the 1st day of Janu- 
ar}', 1869, 42,255 miles, of railway, the cost of which, at 44,000 dol- 
lars per mile, equalled 1,800,000,000 dollars. 

The total amount of net tonnage transported over them for the 
year equalled 75,000,000 tons, having a value of 10,472,250,000 dol- 
lars, a sum equalling six times their cost, and more than four times 
greater than the whole amount of the national debt ! 

Historically, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad took precedence of 
all others. The opening of its first section (twenty-three miles) took 
place in 1830. 

Massachusetts has one mile of railroad to 5.47 square miles of 
territory. In the same ratio the whole Union would have 600,000 
miles of railway. 

The Pacific Railroad is probably the greatest monument of a nation's 
beneficence which the history of man has to show. By the following 
figures, which are taken from the report of a special commission ap- 
pointed by the President, of which General G. K. Warren was Presi- 
dent, it will be seen that the United States has endorsed the bonds 
of the two corporations which make one grand trunk line to the 
Pacific, to the amount of 53,000,000 dollars. 

The aid in the shape of subsidy bonds and first mortgage bonds 
received by each company was as follows : the Union Pacific, 525 
miles from Omaha to the base of the Rocky Mountains, at 16,000 
dollars per mile, 8,400,000 dollars ; 150 miles across the Rocky 
Mountains, at 40,000 dollars per mile, 7,200,000 dollars ; 360 miles, 
extending to Ogden, at 32,000 dollars per mile, 11,520,000 dollars. 
Total, 27,120,000 dollars. This is equal to 26,200 dollars per mile, 
and the first mortgage bonds are issued in a like amount, — 26,200 
dollars per mile. Total, 52,400 dollars per mile. Subsidy bonds 
received by the Central Pacific road, six miles from Sacramento to the 



390 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

base of the Sierra Nevada, 16,000 dollars per mile, 96,000 dollars; 
150 miles across the Sierra Nevada, at 48,000 dollars per mile, 
7,200,000 dollars; 585 miles thence to Ogden, at 32,000 dollars per 
mile, 18,720,000 dollars. Total, 26,016,000 dollars, or 35,109 dollars 
averaged upon each and every mile of the road. First mortgage 
bonds in a like amount, 35,109 dollars per mile. Total subsidy and 
first mortgage bonds on each and every mile of the road, 70,218 
dollars. 

The same commission reported that nearly fourteen millions of dol- 
lars would be required to bring the Pacific railroads up to the best 
standards of construction and equipment. 

To institute any comparison between American and English public 
works would be vain, the one being a broad continent, and the other 
a narrow island. 

The canals of New York are over 900 miles long. They have cost, 
with their several enlargements, not less than 35,000,000 dollars, and 
with the river navigation and railway system of interior New York, 
would probably make the sum more than 200,000,000 dollars. 

Some minor items of expenditure in America and England may be 
interesting. In 1860, 12,206 American vessels entered United 
States ports, exceeding the number of foreign vessels by nearly 
2,000 ; in six years thereafter American tonnage decreased more than 
forty per cent., while foreign tonnage increased nearly eighty. 

The coinage of England and America is quite different. America, 
like France, has adopted the decimal system in money, except that 
we divide the hundred into four parts, and coin dollars, half dollars, 
and quarter dollars, while the French properly divide it into fifths, 
and coin Napoleons, demi-Napoleons, and five-franc pieces. The 
English, however, have the old embarrassing sj^stem of pounds, shil- 
lings, and pence ; there is no such thing as a pound in coin, but a 
sovereign, which is equal to about a sixpence less than a five-dollar 
gold piece. The English shilling is nearly equal to our quarter dol- 
lar, and is quite a different thing from the York shilling, which is 
equivalent to the old Mexican twelve-and-a-half-cent piece. It is 
probable that before long we shall all adopt the French system in 
money, in measure, and in weight, in which case it might be well to 
call the great standard coin " The Peace ; " then it could be said that 
the empire was indeed the Peace, for it is more a piece of money, than 
a piece of principle. 

In 1868 the British government expended six millions of dollars in 



BRITISH AND AMERICAN FINANCE. 



391 



public buildings and works, which was much greater than our expen- 
ditures counting out the railways. 

The interest and the management of England's permanent debt in 
18G8, was 115,000,000 dollars ; 1,500,000 dollars was spent in giving 
pensions ; 4,000,000 dollars went to what is called the " packet 
service." It cost twelve and a half million dollars to collect the cus- 
toms and internal revenue. The expenditures exceeded the revenue 
in that year six and a half million dollars. 

One million paupers were fed in that year, and upwards of twenty 
thousand persons convicted of crime. 

There are held of our bonds, 600,000,000 dollars in Europe, and 
250,000 dollars of other American securities, thereby increasing our 
debt to Europe 70,000,000 dollars a year. The British revenue is 
almost entirely derived from Custom House duties and excise, or 
home taxation ; the latter brings nearly 100,000,000 dollars a year ; 
the Post Office clears 25,000,000 dollars, while ours gets in debt ; the 
English receive nearly 50,000,000 dollars from the sale of stamps. 

All the property in the United States is said to be worth twenty 
billions of dollars [20,000,000,000]. 

The English revenue from customs is nearly altogether derived 
from the duties upon a few articles, none of which compete with home 
products. The figures of customs revenue for two years are thus 



Sugar and molasses 

Tea . . 

Coffee . 

Corn meal and flour 

Spirits 

Wine . 

Tobacco and snuff 

Other imports 

Sundries 

Total customs 



1867. 


18681 


£5,647,787 


£5,582,473 


2,658,716 


2,827,317 


397,190 


390,161 


797,639 


869,323 


4,173,027 


4,298,403 


1,391,192 . 


1,468,993 


6,455,011 


6,542,250 


577 ; 666 


581,481 


200,838 


104,580 



£22,299,066 £22,664,981 



The expenses of collecting this revenue are small, compared to 
those of collecting duties on several thousand different articles, as we 
do in America. Our tax list makes a book nearly as large as 
Webster's Dictionary, and is annually changed to suit the interests 
of legislators and their constituents. The whole financial system of 
England runs smoother and more equally than ours. Ninety-six per 



392 hie new yvoiu.p compared with rm old, 

oent of I sos is collected from spii 

malt, -. rhe Income tas la i fraction over two per cent ; 

[ual to that collected iu the 
United S has boon generally five per c< 

all articles of imp 
and i upon a d< I has found the latter 

i h revenue* O. 
th the United States Revenue Bureau ta 
: V v V: his sni^ostion NN e Iskey 

Ion, and we Increased the revenue 

rhe annual British debt is about one hundred and 

loliars [ I >000 |, rhe British people 

>ur and a n w j 3 oar, man, woman, 

and child, to il debt 

v compai Great Britain between 

August, L86 ited to tour hundred and eighty 
numl 

American ret ..'. taxes in I860 n 

90 dollai 1868, hi revenue alone, thej were 

191/ .000 

300,000, 

lefeet in [ho A is its civil sen 

Lass of m< d as n e have, to 

ago. 1: is useless to qualify this - 

under Mr* 

5, •- W '.'.. 
offioe woi 

v\ erom< How 

al bj it " venue service is venal as that of 

B 

i of mak 
te& 
n . IV To- ted, 

. WOUld : — 

% * I conclude/ 1 he says, •• ■ having reoours* 

computations, and l ling a (X 



BRITISH A WNAHCR 393 

provo Incorrect) that the democratic government of the Americana is 
not a cheap government- sometimes asserted; and I hav 

hesitation in predicting, that if the people of tile I 
ever involved in .serious difficult taxation ily be in- 

creased to the rate of that which prevails in the : part of the 

aristocracies and the monarchies of Europe." 

The mo juine expectations of the Americans as to paj 

the national debt are based upon the value of the publie lands, and 
the increase of immigration. Daring the era of sla- reliance 

to meet the cost of our imports from Europe was by the expo, 
cotton. During our civil war, the utmost energies of England were 
put forth to make her colonies cotton plantations, and thereby rid 
herself of dependence npon the United States. Th inch 

attended those efforts is probably one of the vital causes of the de- 
cline of American commerce and industry. 

In 1804, we were told that thirty-nine sources, exclusive of the 
United States, contributed to the supply of cotton at Manchester ; 
that Australia, Jamaica, French West Indies. Greece, Turkey, Brazil, 
Portugal, Morocco, Egypt, Italy, Austria (on the Adriatic;, Hayti, 
Malta, Japan, China, and Venezuela were among the producers ; that 
the average fibre of foreign cotton, in fourteen instances, was equal, 
for average purposes of manufacture, to the American fibre ; and that 
in several, and in fact most, of the countries named cotton can be 
cultivated and exported to England at cheaper rates than American 
planters can afford. 

It would be neglect to quit this great and involved subject with- 
out reference to the two contending principles which are now 
dividing parties, communities, and even families in the United St. 
— those of Free Trade, and High Tariff, or " Protection." The E 
lish people long ago determined this issue, and there is practical Free 
Trade throughout the British dominions, a Tariff being imposed upon 
a few articles, — chiefly those of luxury, — and dire staining 

revenue rather than to nursing the home manufactures and products 
of Great Britain. The American Tariff is more partial, and is not 
only directed toward the collection of revenue on our frontiers, but 
toward placing an embargo upon many articles of foreign manufacture, 
so that our people shall be compelled to purchase at home, and 
there by encourage, enrich, or Ci protect" the native miner and manu- 
facturer. In the early history of the country, our statesmen were 
divided upon the subject of the Tariff, the agricultural representatives 
50 



394: THE NEW WOULD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

holding that, as good government was based upon the principle of 
the greatest good to the greatest number, no specific interest should 
be protected by the Tariff, but that the people should be free to buy 
in the cheapest market, and sell in the dearest. 

The other sentiment took the position that, as our nation was in 
its infancy, and as its manufactures were vital to its happiness and 
independence, these should be protected against foreign competition, 
until they were able to stand alone. Amongst the advocates of the 
latter sentiment, none were more eminent and eloquent than Henry 
Clay ; for he coupled with his High Tariff ideas the generous princi- 
ples of Internal Improvements ; but it is well known that he failed to 
reach the goal of his aspirations, — the Chief Magistracy, — notwith- 
standing the powerful special interests he favored. It was after the 
rise of the Republican, or Anti-slavery party in the North, that the 
High Tariff interest attained its principal political triumphs ; for the 
North, needing all its energies to meet the rebellion, was little dis- 
posed to divide upon the minor Tariff issue. When the rebellion had 
been quelled, it was found that the High Tariff men were uppermost, 
constituting a majority in the Senate and the House, and up to the 
present writing (1869) they have succeeded in holding the Tariff up 
to the very highest notch. They are powerfully seconded by such 
vigorous journals as the New York " Tribune," edited by Horace Gree- 
ley, one of the ablest journalists that any nation ever had, while on 
the other hand, the " Evening Post " of New York, edited by William 
Cullen Bryant, the poet, and the North-western press at large, are 
radical advocates of Free Trade. 

Symptoms of dissatisfaction with the various tariffs are manifest- 
ing themselves on every hand ; in New England, Edward Atkinson, 
himself a manufacturer, has declared for Free Trade, on the ground 
that our manufactures will better thrive by the ingenuity and perse- 
verance of their mechanics and capitalists, than by waiting like 
Lazarus, at the gate of the government, and asking to be subsidized. 
Still more remarkable is it that William Lloyd Garrison, Henry 
Ward Beecher, and the leading pioneers in the anti-slavery cause are 
also earnest advocates for the complete emancipation of trade and 
commerce on this continent. This is but natural, for in England 
Emancipation and Free Trade went hand in hand ; the same banners 
marshalled the armies of both reforms, and men found it impossible 
to be advocates for freedom in the moral and political world, and yet 
decry its blessings in the world of commerce. At the present writ- 



BRITISH AND AMERICAN FINANCE. 395 

ing (1809) the extreme Tariff men hold the whip-hand in America ; 
the manufacturers themselves seek admission to Congress, that they 
may influence their interests there, and when upon a recent occasion 
Mr. David A. "Wells, the special Commissioner of the Revenue, advo- 
cated the reduction of certain import duties, a bill was passed by the 
House forthwith to strike out the salary for his office. 

In England, at the time Free Trade was popularized, it was not 
the manufacturers, but the agriculturalists, who opposed it. They 
argued that the right little, tight little Island of Great Britain, having 
few acres to spare, could not grow wheat in competition with the bar- 
barous Russian and the sleepless American, unless a High Tariff 
were put upon it, to " protect the British farmer." 

Since the repeal of the " Corn Laws" in England, agriculture, so 
far from being crushed out, has attained perfection and importance 
beyond all its previous career. 

11 As the development of manufactures/' says a recent historian, 
" was the grand economical feature of the last century, that of agri- 
culture appears likely to become the distinctive feature of the pres- 
The pernicious spell of protection is dissolved ; something like 
a scientific education is now to be obtained by the next generation 
of farmers ; and our sanitary researches are about to provide an ample 
supply of the first requisite of increased production. We may hope 
soon to see the agricultural population once more gaining on the 
manufacturing, and the rural laboring-class ceasing to be the oppro- 
brium of our polity. ,, 

It is to be lamented that, by the collision of private and partisan 
interests, this merely economical question has become a subject of 
bitterness rather than of fair and philanthropic inquiry. In the period 
we have reached, it is manifest that these industrial questions are to 
be examined, and place-hunters and partisans, on both sides, will 
doubtless attempt to turn them to their own mercenary uses. The 
great question is, will tbe people be happier with a High Tariff or a 
Revenue Tariff? What are the natural relations of the American con- 
tinent and the American mind to manufactures? Is the manufac- 
turing or the agricultural interest most prejudicial to our individual 
manhood and our institutions? Must our manufacturers cling to the 
skirts of partisanship? Are the ingenuity and the perseverance req- 
uisite for mechanical excellence best protected by playing the syco- 
phant to legislation, or by being cast aloof upon their own resources, 



396 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

like the typical American character? And is it Democratic or Re- 
publican to bolster up one interest and neglect the rest? 

He would be a rash man who should undertake to settle this ques- 
tion in the limits of a chapter. The English have settled it in favor 
of Free Trade, and amougst the latest English tourists in our country, 
has been one, Mr. Charles W. Dilke, who has in his book, entitled 
" Greater Britain," given liberal interpretation to the arguments of 
American protectionists. 

" Those who speak," he says, w of the selfishness of the Protection- 
ists as a whole, can never have taken the trouble to examine into the 
arguments by w T hich Protection is supported in Australia and 
America. In these countries Protection is no mere national de- 
lusion ; it is a system deliberately adopted with open eyes as one 
conducive to the country's welfare, in spite of objections known to all ; 
in spite of pocket losses that come home to all. If it be, as we in 
England believe, a folly, it is, at all events, a sublime one, full of 
self-sacrifice, illustrative of a certain nobility in the national heart. 
The Australian diggers and Western farmers in America are setting 
a grand example to the world of self-sacrifice for a national object ; 
hundreds of thousands of rough men are content to live — they and 
their families — upon less than they might otherwise enjoy, in order 
that the condition of the mass of their countrymen may continue 
raised above that of their brother toilers in Old England. Their 
manufactures are beginning now to stand alone ; but hitherto, with- 
out Protection, the Americans would have had no cities but seaports. 
By picturing to ourselves England dependent upon the city of London, 
upon Liverpool, and Hull, and Bristol, we shall see the necessity the 
Western men are now under of setting off Pittsburg against New 
York and Philadelphia. 

" It would seem," he continues, " as though we Free Traders had 
become nearly as bigoted in favor of Free Trade as our former 
opponents were in favor of Protection. Just as they used to say, 
' Wc are right, why argue the question ? ' so now, in face of the 
support of Protection by all the greatest minds in America, all the 
first statesmen of the Australias, we tell the New England and the 
Australian politicians that we will not discuss Protection with them,| 
because there can be no two minds about it among men of intelligence 
and education. 

" As far as we in our island are concerned, it is so manifestly to 
the pocket interest of almost all of us, and at the same time, on 



BRITISH AND AMERICAN FINANCE. 397 

account of the minuteness of our territory, so little dangerous politi- 
cally, that for Britain there can be no danger of a deliberate relapse 
into Protection ; although we have but little right to talk about Free 
Trade so long as we continue our enormous subsidies to the Cunard 
liners. 

" The American argument in favor of Prohibition is in the main, it 
will be seen, political, the economical objections being admitted, but 
outweighed. Our action in the matter of our postal contracts, as in 
the case of the factory acts, at all events shows that we are not our- 
selves invariably averse to distinguish between the political and the 
economical aspect of certain questions." 

Mr. Dilke makes one curious argument, and upon a curious prem- 
ise : that the western farmers are all Tariff men. 

" The tendency, according to the Western farmers of Free Trade," 
he says, u in the early stages of a country's existence, is to promote 
universal centralization, to destroy local centres and the commerce 
they create, to so tax the farmer with the cost of transport to the 
distant centres, consequent upon the absence of local markets, that 
he can but grow wheat and corn continuously, and cannot but exhaust 
his soil. With markets so distant, the richest forest lands are not 
worth clearing, and a wave of settlement sweeps over the country, 
occupying the poorer lands, and then abandoning them once more." 

I cannot better conclude this chapter than by quoting from the 
scholarly and philosophical author of " England's Greatness." 
" Whether reciprocated, or not, Free Trade, like many other virtues, 
has inherent advantages ; may be administered in any quantity, and 
be proportionately remunerative. In its practical application it is 
irrespective of time or place, of old or young communities ; to small 
or large States, it is correspondingly beneficial. Nations which trade 
the most will profit by it the most ; but those of less traffic will 
benefit in proportion to the extent of their commerce. 

" England, being the most mercantile community, is the most inter- 
ested in its adoption ; and being also the most prosperous, a forward 
example by her is likely most to fix attention, and be followed. 
Ireland was cramped and irritated, and driven to the verge of rebel- 
lion by the oppressive and pernicious nature of the protective system. 
The opening of her trade was the first step in her conciliation, and 
in drawing into more friendly sympathies with England the middle 
classes of her population. The same maladies continued for a longer 
period to alienate and retard the progress of British North America, 



398 THE NEW WOULD COMPARED "WITH THE OLD. 

and our West Indian Colonies, and which was alleviated by similar 
remedies. Their trade was fettered ; they were limited in their 
markets, both for the sale and purchase of goods ; they were con- 
strained to trade only with the mother country, to buy dear and sell 
cheap, and the injury to both was aggravated by distance and 
freightage." 




4 5 

NATIONAL SHRINES. 
1— Fan^uil Hall, Boston. 2— State House, Annapolis. 3— State House, Philadelphia. 
4 — Napoleon's Tomb. 5— Tower of London. 



CHAPTER XV. 

POLITICS AND POLITICAL PARTIES ON BOTH SIDES OF THE SEA. 

A revelation of the rise and principles of the whig, tory, conservative, liberal, republican, 
federal, radical, chartist, and -whatsoever other parties have existed in America or 
England. — An electioneering campaign in England from the proclamation of an 
election to the close of the poll. — The philosophy of party organizations in a free 
state, 

The history of English politics may be said to have commenced 
with the expulsion of James II., the last of the male Stuarts, for 
prior to that time there had been revolution, and the conflict of sects 
and families, but not organized party politics as we comprehend it. 
When James Stuart was driven out of England into exile, the House 
of Commons obtained the assent of his dethroner, William, Prince of 
Orange, to a Bill of Rights, whereby Parliament and people were 
given leave to assemble, to petition, and to speak and print as 
became them, being subjects. Then began the ferment of parties 
and leaders, and there had already existed the nicknames of Whig 
and Tory, and many of the conditions of party organization. 

" Whig " was a word derived from a whey, or whig, of sour milk drunk 
by the hunted Scotch Covenanters ; and " Tory" was either the name 
of a robber or of a robber band, or of a robber's challenge to stand and 
deliver. On general principles it may be said that a " Tory" was an 
advocate of the monarchy in all its despotic prerogatives, and a 
" Whig " an advocate of monarchy limited by Parliament, by a lenient 
aristocracy, and by law. 

But after the Stuarts had been expelled a large portion of the 
Tories sympathized with them, and endeavored to intrigue for their 
restoration ; these were called Jacobites. At the same time a few 
Tories preferred that the Stuarts should not return, but that the 
house of Hanover should reign ; these were called Hanoverian To- 
ries. 

The conflicts of these three parties were long, and extended to 
bloodshed and warfare. The Jacobites rallied around the " Pre- 

399 



400 THE NEW WOULD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

tender," as one of the Stuarts was called, when he landed in Scot- 
land, and were defeated, hanged, and banished by hundreds. They 
settled in Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, and in many other 
American States, furnishing us with some splendid family stock. 

Our American ancestors were partisans of one or the other of 
these two English parties, Whig and Tory, and we gave these names 
in the Revolution to patriots and loyalists, respectively. After the 
Revolution we dropped for a while the old distinctions and became 
Federals, and Republicans, followers of Hamilton or Jefferson rela- 
tively ; but after some time the word Whig was revived to indicate 
the successor of the first Federal party, while the term Republican 
became radicalized into Democratic. Thus, even at the present day 
there are mournful old men in the United States who say with some 
sorry fondness : " I was an old-line Whig ! " thereby expressing a 
Scotch term of almost lost antiquity. 

In England these two terms continued uninterruptedly down to the 
passage of the Reform Bill, when they were exchanged for Liberal and 
Conservative ; but, meantime, the structure and policy of both parties 
changed repeatedly, the two organizations striving less for principles 
in the end than for power and the continuance of it. 

It is easy to imagine the causes of origin of the two early parties 
in the United States ; one was not all cured of reverence for English 
government ; the other wanted a new pattern of nation, in part 
Roman, in part Saxon, in part original and philosophic. 

" The deeper we penetrate into the working of these parties, the 
more do we perceive," says De Tocqueville, "that the object of the 
one is to limit, and that of the other to extend the popular authority. 
I do not assert," he adds, u that the ostensible end, or even that the 
secret aim, of American parties is to promote the rule of aristocracy 
or democracy in the country ; but I affirm that aristocratic or demo- 
cratic passions may easily be detected at the bottom of all parties, 
and that, although they escape a superficial observation, they are 
the main point and the very soul of every faction in the United 
States." 

We cannot more agreeably obtain the status of those two early 
organizations led respectively b} r the greatest of Americans, than in 
the words of the same sprightly authority : — 

" The party which desired to limit the power of the people en- 
deavored to apply its doctrines more especially to the Constitution 



POLITICS, ETC., ON BOTH SIDES OF THE SEA. 401 

of the Union, whence it derived its name of Federal. The other 
part}', which affected to be more exclusively attached to the cause of 
liberty, took that of Republican. America is the land of democracy, 
and the Federalists were always in a minority ; but they reckoned 
on their side almost all the great men who had been called forth by 
the War of Independence, and their moral influence was very con- 
siderable. Their cause was, moreover, favored by circumstances. 
The ruin of the Confederation had impressed the people with a dread 
of anarchy, and the Federalists did not fail to profit by this transient 
disposition of the multitude. For ten or twelve years they were at 
the head of affairs, and they were able to apply some, though not all, 
of their principles ; for the hostile current was becoming from day to 
day too violent to be checked or stemmed. In 1801 the Republicans 
got possession of the government ; Thomas Jefferson was named 
President ; and he increased the influence of their party by the weight 
of his celebritjr, the greatness of his talents, and the immense extent 
of his popularity. 

" The means by which the Federalists had maintained their posi- 
tion were artificial, and their resources were temporary ; it was by 
the virtues or the talents of their leaders that they had risen to 
power." 

This statement is incisive ; for it may be said that the Constitu- 
tion of the United States and the Farewell Address of Washington 
bear the Federal imprint and the tone of Hamilton, while the Declara- 
tion of Independence and the American policy were the legacy of 
Jefferson. Hamilton, mastering or sharing the convictions of Wash- 
ington, impressed himself upon the Federal compact and the early 
state, while Jefferson, with whom had been, doubtless, the practical 
sympathies of Franklin, gave the country original republicanism, and 
made the American character more pronouncedly democratic than the 
teachings of our Constitution. To Hamilton we owe the state as a 
fabric, to Jefferson the people as a conviction. 

The great event which influenced the formation and consolidation 
of political parties in England and America — and throughout the 
world, indeed — was the French Revolution, in part the child of our 
own, but made a monster of good and evil by the philosophers and 
magi who had predicted it, and who became its tutors, and also by 
the resentment of France against an obdurate aristocracy. When 
the Revolution began, a powerful party hailed it in America, and a 
less powerful party in England. Fox and Jefferson gave it counte- 
51 



402 THE NEW WOKLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

nance, a and at first human millennium seemed to have come ; but the 
embittered Tories of the monarchy and aristocracy in England, fear- 
ful that their turn was next to be, laid the basis of an opposition 
which never ceased till France was prostrate. They first incited the 
French aristocratic exiles to annoy France, and they subsidized the 
German powers against her, till the public exasperation of the Repub- 
licans ran to bloody excesses, — then with denunciations of these by 
Burke and others, they fired the English heart. The old national 
animosity succeeded to popular sympathy with a redeemed people, 
and England plunged into that costly generation of slaughter which 
made the meteor reputation of Bonaparte, and turned the human 
sluices of Europe into the channels of American emigration. Dur- 
ing all that time the Toiy party held the English government in their 
iron grip, while they poured money abroad like water; but in the 
reign of George IV., when France was ruined, Englishmen, with 
their usual envy, turned against their continental allies, and to break 
up the Holy Alliance or league of continental monarchs, the Tory 
party under Canning almost dissolved, and under Peel and Welling- 
ton even favored Catholic emancipation in the British realms. The 
sentiment of Europe is, that England went mad during these French 
wars, and the very excesses of the Revolution are now more readily 
excused than the bitter hate of its reactionary rival, A local histo- 
rian of Manchester gives this illustration of the Tory party's pre- 
scriptive fashion of subduing sympathy for France. 

" Many of the older inhabitants of Manchester will recollect seeing, 
in the public houses of their younger days, boards bearing the inscrip- 
tion ' No Jacobins admitted here.' These boards date their origin 
from the year 1792 ; and so late as 1825, there was one of them in a 
public house in Bridge Street. They were put up to prevent the dis- 
cussion of reform principles in bar-parlors. We are told that shortly 
after the government proclamation mentioned above, and to prevent a 
meeting announced to be held to raise a subscription for the sufferers 
by war in France, a tax-gatherer, accompanied by several other per- 
sons, went round the town to all the inn-keepers and publicans, ad- 
vising them, if they had any regard for the renewal of their licenses, 
to suffer no societies similar to the constitutional to meet in their 
houses ; and obtained the signatures of one hundred and eighty-six 
inn-keepers and publicans to a document, the import of which was as 
follows : ' We, whose names are hereunto subscribed, being licensed 
inn-keepers and alehouse-keepers, within the towns of Manchester and 



POLITICS, ETC., ON BOTH SIDES OF THE SEA. 403 

Salford, justly alarmed, at the treasonable and seditious conduct of a 
well-known set of daring miscreants, who have called a public meet- 
ing to be held on Tuesday next at the Bull's Head Inn, in Manches- 
ter, for the avowed purpose of assisting the French savages, as well 
as with a sincere desire of introducing similar calamities to the in- 
habitants of this happy and prosperous country, as those that now 
exist in France, take this very necessary opportunit}^ of publishing 
to the towns of Manchester and Salford in particular, and to the 
whole kingdom of Great Britain in general, our detestation of such 
wicked and abominable practices. And we do hereby solemnly de- 
clare, that we will not suffer any meeting to be held in our houses, of 
any clubs or societies, however specious or plausible their titles may 
be, that have a tendency to put in force what those infernals so 
ardently and devoutly wish for, namely, the destruction of this coun- 
ty ; and we will be ready on all occasions to co-operate with our 
fellow-townsmen in bringing to justice all those who shall offend in 
any instance against our much admired and most excellent consti- 
tution." This document is dated, " Manchester, September 13th, 
1792." 

The United States also sympathized with France, until the be- 
havior of her Minister in America and the insolent demand of a 
loan which her representatives made of ours, provoked the country 
into a wounded neutrality, if not to resentment. But by our gen- 
eral sympathy with the French people, whether under the republic, 
the consulate, or the empire, we have kept our record clear with 
France, and were enabled to possess ourselves of Louisiana, her colony. 

Every subsequent revolution of France, as in 1830 and 1848, 
created ferments in England, and led to semi-republican or ultra re- 
publican parties, chief of which was that of the " Chartists," who 
demanded five radical points of reform, namely : manhood suffrage, 
annual Parliaments, vote by ballot, remuneration of members of Par- 
liament, and the abolition of the property qualification. The Chartists 
being mainly laboring men, were unfortunate in their leaders, and 
lacking a solid and persevering organization were intimidated by the 
Londoners and by the soldiery. They had prepared a petition, which 
was to be rolled into Parliament like a huge cartwheel, and which was 
said to contain five millions of names. The petition was subjected 
by Parliament to a thorough examination. "It weighed," says an 
authority, n not five tons, but under five hundred weight. The signa- 
tures were not five millions, but about a million and a half; and these 






404 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

were not all genuine. The Duke of Wellington's name occurred 
seventeen times ; the Prince Consort's and even the Queen's pretended 
signature was there, and those of the ministers. There were nick- 
names, jests, and even indecent terms ; and whole sheets were in the 
same handwriting. The five points were not likely to be obtained 
in such a way as this ; and this is, in fact, the closing scene of the 
Chartist agitation in England. 

" The proceedings of that day were watched from all parts of 
Europe ; and the result produced as strong an effect on observers as 
perhaps any one of the revolutions of the time. The peace had been 
kept without the appearance of a single soldier, and by the citizens 
themselves re-enforcing the civic police. From that day it was a 
settled matter that England was safe from revolution. There were 
no causes for it, no elements of it ; and there was a steady and cheer- 
ful determination, on the part of the people, that there should be none. 
No sovereign and no polity were ever safer at any time than the 
Queen and the constitution of England in the revolutionary years of 
1848-9." 

But not always by the same management are political demonstra- 
tions suppressed in England, as witness the celebrated massacre in 
1819, where the people in Manchester, meeting to consider the Ke- 
form Bill, were sabred by the militia, so that the field was called 
" Peterloo." Of this disgraceful act Bamford, the Manchester histo- 
rian, says : " On the breaking of the crowd, the yeomanry wheeled ; 
and dashing wherever there was an opening they followed, pressing 
and wounding. Many females appeared as the crowd opened ; and 
striplings and mere youths were also found. Their cries were 
piteous and heart-rending, and would, one might have supposed, have 
disarmed any human resentment; but their appeals were in vain. 
Women, white-vested maids, and tender youths were indiscriminately 
sabred or trampled on, and we have reason for believing that few 
were the instances in which that forbearance was vouchsafed which 
they so earnestly implored. In ten minutes from the commencement 
of the havoc, the field was an open and almost deserted space. The 
sun looked down through a sultry and motionless air ; the curtains 
and blinds of the windows, within view, were all closed. A gentle- 
man or two might occasionally be seen looking out from some houses 
of recent erection, near the door of which a group of persons (special 
constables) were collected, and apparently in conversation ; others 
were assisting the wounded or carrying off the dead. The hustings 



POLITICS, ETC., ON BOTH SIDES OE THE SEA. 405 

remained with a few broken and severed flag-staves erect, and a torn 
or gashed banner or two drooping ; while over the whole field were 
strewed caps, bonnets, hats, shawls, and shoes, and other parts of 
male and female dress, trampled, torn, and bloody. The .yeomanry 
had dismounted ; some were easing their horses' girths, others adjus- 
ing their accoutrements, and some were wiping their sabres. Several 
mounds of human beings still remained where they had fallen, crushed 
down, and smothered ; some of these were still groaning ; others with 
staring eyes were gasping for breath ; and others would never breathe 
more. All were silent, save those low sounds, and the occasional 
snorting and pawing of steeds. Persons might sometimes be noticed 
peeping from attics, and over the tall ridgings of houses ; but they 
quickly withdrew, as if fearful of being observed, or unable to sus- 
tain the full gaze of a scene so hideous and abhorrent." 

This is the language of a native Englishman, and it shows that the 
great American " mob," which is always a startling feature of an 
English book, is sometimes a more innocent organization than an 
English constabulary. 

" Young England" was another party, springing out of the Tories, 
which proposed, from a different motive, to grant principles some- 
what akin to Chartism ; in short, it proposed to resume a mild feudal 
or landed control, a benignant despotism over the poor, and let them 
help the Tory party to destroy the Whigs. 

The true u Radical" party of England is the joint product of very 
liberal middle-class people in the cities, and of the more intelligent 
and public-spirited manufacturers ; with these affiliate a few literary 
and scientific men, and it is powerfully recruited from the young 
tradesmen and clerks #nd from the better working-classes. The 
Radical party was so named by Pitt in 1798, when he denounced it, 
and at that time it included even a Duke of Norfolk. The Radical 
party of England at the present day is not, like " Chartism," " Incle- 
pendentism," etc., begotten of semi-French philosophy, nor of the 
miseries of the working-classes, but of the experience of America and 
of the practical philanthropy of the manufacturing mind in England. 
It is almost identical with the " Manchester School," and its expound- 
ers came from both the other parties ; for it has sometimes acted 
with one, sometimes with another : coalescing with the Whigs, it car- 
ried the Reform Bill ; with the Tories it wrought out Catholic eman- 
cipation and the Repeal of the Corn Laws. It is a cautious, business- 
like, vigorous party, and at present seems in a fair way to swallow 



406 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

the Liberal party with which it is allied uneasily. When one sees 
" Punch" and the " Times," after twenty years of scurrility, to praise 
John Bright, he may know that to be a Radical is almost fashionable 
now. Even the u Saturday Review," a representatively vicious Eng- 
lish periodical straining to be a more snarling sort of " Times," says 
that within a few years the whole scheme of Conservative belief is 
shaken to the foundation. " Things which a short time ago were ac- 
counted very dreadful are now spoken of as the most natural and in- 
nocent things in the world. Men like Mr. Bright, who were deemed 
a pest to decent society, are now flattered and courted, and hold them- 
selves out successfully as the kind patrons of the government. There 
is scarcely any political opinion held so steadfastly in England that 
w^e cannot now easily conceive it fading away, and there is no man of 
anything like real intellectual force whose career we can anticipate. 
Changes in the relations of the governed to their governors, in the 
relations of the poor and the rich, in the relations of the Church to 
the State, and to modern thought, — changes that a short time ago 
seemed quite chimerical, — now float before every one as entering the 
range, not only of possibility, but of a not very remote probability." 

An American sometimes speaks of his political traditions, meaning 
that his father was of the same party with himself; but there is no 
place where opinion differs so widely as at an American breakfast- 
table. We hear of " old line" Whigs — but where are the young 
Whigs ? — and of " straight-out " Democrats ; but the present anti-Dem- 
ocratic party in America derives its best strength from the sons of 
the enthusiasts for Jackson. An opinion here invites no spleen ; an 
American father is apt to think his son individual and pluckful if he 
differs from his " traditions." From the son-in-law of Thomas Ben- 
ton, the sturdiest Democrat in America, came the first Republican 
candidate for the Presidency ; and it frequently happened in the civil 
war, that from the same hearthstone went a son into the army of the 
North, and one into the army of the South. The politician in Amer- 
ica begins almost in the cradle ; but the party man in England began 
in his great-grandfather. None are politicians there, in any influen- 
tial sense, unless they are rich or " gentle ; " and until within a few 
years past politics in England w^^e guided entirely by " family" 
considerations. The House of Bedford is alwa} r s Whig, — why so? 
Family ! The King once cut off the head of John Russell, and that 
made the Russells Whigs for indefinite futurity. 

The House of Derby is always conservative, — why ? The Stanleys 



POLITICS, ETC., ON BOTH SIDES OF THE SEA. 407 

rallied round their sovereign, and that circle can never untwist. 
When we find a person of this t} r pe in America, we generally exhibit 
him as a spectacle, and treat him mildly and kindly, saying, " Lo ! 
"the poor Indian ! " 

There is a reason for all this English doggedness, curious as it 
may appear, as there is reason, also, for our family centrifugalism. 
We have no very strong family instinct after the second generation ; 
we quit the family hearthstone in New York, or New England, or 
Maryland, and occupy some frontier neighborhood, so that our " tra- 
ditions " are soon lost, and we then take party positions, not accord- 
ing to our memory, but according to our newspaper, our pastor, our 
prejudice,- our immediate interest, and often according to our impulse 
of principle. We often vote many ways in our lives, going about 
from party to party as we like ; sometimes because we love the can- 
didate, sometimes because we feel the sweep of public revolution, 
sometimes because we have " read up " some question and changed 
convictions upon it. 

But in cramped England there is no moving to far frontiers ; there 
is little change of occupation or interest ; the close boundaries of the 
island keep us to our neighborhood, and the roof-tree, like a warning 
tombstone, points out the party affiliations we must assume. It says, 
" Here my ancestors were Whigs ! here are all their portraits ! out of 
their party they chose their boon-companions, and of the same are 
my friends yet. It is abandoning the graveyard, it is apostasy to 
acquaintanceship, it is infidelity to superstition, to vault because of 
an author or an idea from the venerable of the old to the apparent of 
the new ! " 

Nevertheless, in England as here, there are politicians, who, by 
dint of the lust of power, of the hate of the rival family's promo- 
tion, and by wider experience in the world of easy pivots, often con- 
clude to reverse an ancient principle to avoid the loss of place. 
These struggle hard to carry their party over, and generally succeed, 
after a tremendous culinary tempest, by appealing to the same old 
clique-spirit. " If the family of De Boclforcl, Whigs, cater to the new 
public sentiment, and elect their man, then I, De Squodford, Tory, 
must come down from court and privilege, and submit to be patron- 
ized, or to be sulky. Never! I will accept the -hateful innovation 
first." 

It has thus happened that the Liberal party has often been conserv- 
ative, and the Conservative party truly magnanimous. At different 



408 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

times both have been for land, both for Free Trade. " Can any one 
be so blind," says Lord Brougham, " as to believe that if Burke and 
Fox had been ministers of George III., they would rather have 
resigned than make an attempt to subdue America?" — " No ! " says 
Junius, the covert satirist, "Mr. Pitt and Lord Camden were to be 
the patrons of America, because they were in the opposition." 

Party spirit in England is equally unscrupulous with politician 
spirit here. 

The Whigs attempted to get into office in the time of George IV., 
by means of the public sympathy over the trial of Queen Caroline, 
his wife, just as the Republicans in America attempted to secure the 
Presidency by the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson. The Tories, to 
get Lord Melbourne's Cabinet out, got a Mrs. Norton to accuse him 
of criminal conversation with her, just as the American Jeffersonians 
accused Hamilton of a female intrigue, to drive him from office. 

French Democracy, in England, was most successfully argued by 
Jeremy Bentham, and a Jew, Eicardo. Major Cartwright was the 
earliest and most persistent American Republican in England. Jo- 
seph Hume was one of the earliest Radicals. There have been many 
small parties in England, organized upon special issues, and in the 
humbler walks of English life almost every grade of opinion may be 
found ; but in England, as here, the two great parties of Liberal and 
Conservative keep their ranks closed, though they sometimes change 
the mottoes on the banners, and the tune upon the drums. 

The apparent failure of the efforts made in New England, and some 
of the Middle and Western States, ten years ago, to annihilate the 
trade in spirituous, and even in malt liquors, has recently (1869) 
been revived, — in Massachusetts particularly. At one time the 
State of Delaware maintained the anomaly of a prohibitory liquor 
law, and, at the same time, whipping-posts and pillories ; a man could 
be egged in the market-place, but nowhere egg-nogged. The temper- 
ance question is a test question with a large minority of voters, in 
such States as Maine and Michigan, where they have refused to vote 
their party ticket without a temperance declaration appended to its 
platform. In England, attempts were made, as recently as 1869, to 
pass a " permissive bill" through Parliament, making it possible to 
embarrass or prevent the sale of liquors in any parish where two- 
thirds of the poor-rate payers said nay. The bill was lost by a 
decisive vote, though in England, as in America, the women, en 
masse, petitioned for the prohibition. Beer (strong ale) and gin 



POLITICS, ETC., ON BOTH SIDES OF THE SEA. 409 

are the national drinks in England, as lager beer and whiskey are 
with us. 

Mr. John Bright has several times proposed, in England, to raise 
a party cry of " A Free Breakfast Table," with the object of taking 
the taxes off tea, coffee, and sugar. While there are stronger reasons 
for prohibitory liquor laws in England than with us, — as there the 
percentage of drunkards is greater, and is, even with women, large, — 
their enactment is probably very far off; for excepting a certain por- 
tion of the Dissenters, there is no great moral reform element in Eng- 
land, at all corresponding with the Puritan and the Methodist ele- 
ments here. 

The Native American, or " Know Nothing" party, of 1844, revived 
in 1855, was a formidable expression of the prejudice of the native- 
born and Protestant elements against the rapid inroads of foreigners 
upon citizenship, and the suffrage, and against the supposed aggres- 
sions of the Catholic Church. In 1844 the party culminated in for- 
midable riots, and in 1856 it reared itself again upon a secret order, 
like that of the Jesuits it denounced. The prudence of the people 
believed that, with some drawbacks, immigration was still the great 
current of our nation's wealth and life, and not to be discouraged ; 
and also that Protestantism could get no advantage in politics. The 
great party melted away as speedily as it arose, and few of its leaders 
now care to shoulder their propositions propounded at that time. 

Another American party was raised against Free Masonry, which 
developed William H. Seward and Thaddeus Stevens. 

In England there have been popular outcries against the Jews and 
Catholics, and "No Popery" is still a bitter whisper amongst the 
Dissenters. In 1850, the Pope proclaimed a Catholic Hierarchy for 
Great Britain, which caused the Queen to go beside herself, and she 
hastened to Lord John Russell to ask if she were supreme within 
her own realms. A terrible tempest of prejudice followed, and an 
Ecclesiastical Hierarchy bill was passed through Parliament, which 
became a dead letter like many American laws ; everybodg yrew cool 
and remorseful, and the Pope's cardinals, etc., were unmolested. 

The question of the ballot for women is advocated in England by 
John Stuart Mill, a political economist, as here by a number of able 
men and women ; but in either country its triumph seems a long way 
off. Its adoption would certainly be the most formidable change ever 
witnessed in society and morals, probably to the advantage of men, 
52 



410 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

and to the injury of women. We should cease to get drunk, and they 
would cease to be gentle. 

Free Trade, is, as we have said, no longer the policy of any party 
in England ; but in America it has developed into a formidable 
party question, although it was formidable here nearly forty years 
ago: — 

"On the 1st October, 1831, the Free Trade Assembly, which/' 
says De Tocqueville, " according to the American custom, had taken 
the name of a convention, met at Philadelphia ; it consisted of more 
than two hundred members. Its debates were public, and they at 
once assumed a legislative character. The extent of the powers of 
Congress, the theories of Free Trade, and the different clauses of the 
Tariff were discussed in turn. At the end of ten days' deliberation, 
the convention broke up, after having published an address to the 
American people, in which it declared : — 

" I. That Congress had not the right of making a Tariff, and that 
the existing Tariff was unconstitutional. 

"II. That the prohibition of Free Trade was prejudicial to the 
interests of all nations, and to that of the American people in partic- 
ular." 

With its usual tact, the Democratic party, which has now been out 
of power several years, is setting sail toward Free Trade, with the 
hope of luring to its organization the million or more of Republican 
Free Trade voters. This was a Democratic principle long ago, and 
in the " late" war, we carried at our mast-heads : " Free Trade and 
Sailor's Eights ; " but the Democratic party in 18G8 declared for 
" Protection " in its platform, while the Republicans were afraid to 
speak of the subject at all. The politicians on both sides wanted 
both, or neither, or either ; but both of them wanted the people. A 
movement has been made amongst the Irish voters in America, in 
favor of " Protection," it being argued to them that a High Tariff will 
cripple England ; and thus it is possible that we may } T et see old east- 
ern Whigs and Irishmen coalesce against southern Democrats and 
western Republicans. The Free Traders are as }^et of both great 
parties here, led mainly by James W. Grimes, James Brooks, Horace 
White, Marat Halstead, William C. Bryant, Henry Ward Beecher, 
and William Lloyd Garrison. 

I have already alluded to the opinion, generally prevalent, that Sir 
Robert Peel was the first of English statesman. Let us see what 
were his public acts : — 



POLITICS, ETC., ON BOTH SIDES OF THE SEA. 411 

He improved the administration of law, and renovated the police ; 
he brought England from an inconvertible to a sound currency ; he 
obtained Catholic Emancipation ; he carried Free Trade for Eng- 
land ; he refused a peerage, and enjoined his children to remain com- 
moners. 

When Peel died, a small but respectable party was organized upon 
his memory and policy, and its adherents were called " Peelites ; " 
they were utilitarians, and believed in reduced armies and navies, 
non-intervention, and a simple government, but in part administered 
b} r bureaucracy. 

While these are the leading English parties, there is also amongst 
the disfranchised in England, a formidable organization, which seeks 
to give the working-man a separate power in the administration of 
labor. It is this vast organization which is underlying England, like 
internal fire, sometimes forgotten, but always present, and only 
smouldering. When the Chartist excitement in England was highest, 
the operatives threatened to quit work over the whole kingdom unless 
their demands were acceded to. 

The Trades-Union system, of America, exists in even stricter or- 
ganization than in England, and enters as a power into politics, but 
generally, it must be confessed, in the interests of labor and poverty. 

At present the Trades-Unions of the United Kingdom are by some 
thought to be its greatest apparent danger. They are an imperium 
in imperio, in which insufferable tyranny is exercised by workingmen 
over their fellows, from which there seems to be no escape but by the 
gradual process of education. 

The laws provide protection and remedy ; but recourse to that pro- 
tection is prevented by the same oppression. u It is remarkable," 
says Harriet Martineau, " that the one intolerable despotism which 
at this day exists in England is found, not in the government, not in 
the land-owners, not in the old-fashioned rural districts, but in the 
modern democratic towns, — the despotism of working-men over 
fellow-workers in their own class, and their own trade. This is a 
peril which may occur in a republic, and especially if the employers 
possess the sort of monopoly created by a Protective system." In 
the United States the Federal government has already come into di- 
rect conflict with the Trades-Unions, which latter assumed to regulate 
prices, and prescribe the color of trades-employes in the government 
workshops. It is not probable that the dignity of a State will con- 
sent to compromise upon this question with merely masonic bodies, 



412 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

confederated not only in their own private interests, but against the 
wider interests of labor at large. 

The following was the great popular hymn, sung at the mass meet- 
ings to agitate for the Reform Bill, and it is as historic in England 
as is John Brown's song with us : — 

"Lo! we answer! see, we come, 
Quick at Freedom's holy call: 
We come! we come! we come! we come! 

To do the glorious work of all ; 
And hark ! we raise from sea to sea 
The sacred watchword, Liberty! 

° God is our guide! from field, from wave, 

From plough, from anvil, and from loom, 
We come, our country's right to save, 

And speak a tyrant faction's doom. 
And hark ! we raise from sea to sea 
The sacred watchword, Liberty! 

" God is our guide, no swords we draw, 

We kindle not war's battle-fires; 
By union, justice, reason, law, 

We claim the birthright of our sires. 
We raise the watchword, Liberty! 
We will, we will, we will be free." 

Except at the period of the civil war, the lyric has played a small 
part in American politics. Our national anthem is itself an adapta- 
tion. We have had, outside of the slavery discussion, no such ener- 
getic poet as the English Corn Law rhymer, Elliott. Perhaps the 
only American who sent his muse upon partisan errands was Charles 
G. Halpine, a naturalized Irishman, who gained an important local 
office in New York, the Registership, valued at forty thousand dollars 
a 3 f ear, and almost sheerlybythe popularity of his rhymes on partisan 
topics. 

The foreign element in England does not play a like important 
part with ours, and there are, therefore, no such pieces of literature 
there as this of General Halpine. The allusions to the wigwam, etc., 
are merely local to New York : — 

"Say, here! How is it, misther — 
Are you for the Boy, or no? 
For he's bound to be Re-gisther, 
Let the wind blow high or low. 



POLITICS, ETC., ON BOTH SIDES OF THE SEA. 413 

All the Germans an' the Irish here 

For him have dhrawn the skean, 
For Von Halpine trinks zwei lager bier, 

And Miles he ' wears the green.' 

u € He's too young ' ? Your granny's sisther! 

I tell you 'tisn't so; 
An' he's bound to be Re-gisther, 

Let the wind blow high or low. 
All the Celtic and the Teuton vote 

Are friends of his, I ween, 
For Von Halpine schpeist mit pretzel brodt, 

And Miles on mild poteen. 

u Oh, the Wigwam wants a glysther 

For to purge away her ills; 
So we'll make him our Re-gisther, 

An' he'll bate even Radway's pills. 
All the girls are for him ; this is how 

That wondher came to pass, — 
Von Halpine liebt ein blond-e frau, 

And Miles an Irish lass. 

" May my tongue be all a blisther 

If I tell a lie to you, 
For he's bound to be Re-gisther, 

And we all must put him through. 
Oh, he suits the men of every race, 

This gossoon undefiled, *-* 
Von Halpine schpeist mit Schweitzer Kaase, 

An' the Boy on p'raties biled. 

u So here's to Hans von Halpine, 

And to Miles who wears the green; 
Fill your can and dhrink it all, man, 

Or in Rhine wein or poteen; 
For Miles he fit mit Sigel, 

And mit Asboth trinks poteen; 
And you can't find Halpine' s equal 

For ' a-wearing of the green.' " 



The Irish Catholic vote, in Parliament, is frequently a balance of 
power which an English politician must consult. The press of London, 
even more perhaps than that of New York, is written up by Irishmen, 
and Irish rioting in London has been witnessed in nearly equal mag- 
nitude with that of the draft riots in New York, in 1863. We have 
this race of combative people distributed amongst us ; but had we an 
Ireland in America, returning upwards of one hundred Irish mem- 



414 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. ■ 

bers to the House of Representatives, we should find the Irish prob- 
lem difficult indeed to solve. Foreigners are naturalized in England 
with great nicety of discrimination, and by Act of Parliament for 
each individual case. The Home Secretary may also give a certifi- 
cate, affording limited privileges to the alien, and the crown may, by 
patent, create " Denizens." But of wholesale naturalization, such as 
we extend, there is no instance in English history. It is easy for a 
foreign prince to reach the English throne, but hard for a foreigner to 
become an English subject. The greatest immigration to England 
was from the Low Countries, the Rhine and France, during the relig- 
ious wars. The right of exile is alwa} r s respected there. 

By English law, extraordinary and unwonted means of influencing 
political elections are forbidden, such as torchlight processions, pa- 
rades, bands of music, the wearing of emblems, free-lunches and 
free-whiskey ; and although the latter of these clauses is often avoided, 
it must be confessed that an English campaign is generally left more 
to the taste, and less to the excitement, of the elector than with us. 
Huge torchlight processions and sensuous political exhibitions have 
been carried to excess here ; to their abuse we owe the frequent riot- 
ous behavior of excitable classes of our people. The English candi- 
dates address the people, and frequently the opponents speak togeth- 
er ; in general, with personal courtesy the one toward the other, a 
chairman being appointed. Each candidate has his election agents, 
who get out his bills, visit the people, and canvass the district, and 
these must be paid their salaries through an auditor, who is appointed 
by the government returning officer. 

The place of nominating candidates is called the " Hustings," and 
is generally a mere platform, or booth, where the Sheriff reads his 
proclamation ordering an election, the people standing by. If only 
the number of nominations are made that will fill the seats, they are 
both (or all) declared elected. If there be more candidates than 
seats, the Sheriff asks for a show of hands and declares who is 
elected ; but if his count is disputed he orders a poll. The election 
is then adjourned till the polling day, and meantime, all the arts of 
wheedling, ," seeing," etc., are emplo}'ed. At the election the 
borough, or county, is divided into districts, and there is a poll in 
each, where all vote, but not by ballot, and this enables every by- 
stander to hear the choice of every voter. The poor protest against 
this, because their employers or landlords can punish them afterward 
by way of revenge for an adverse vote. The English, allege, how- 



POLITICS, ETC., ON BOTH SIDES OF THE SEA. 415 

ever, that a stealthy vote takes away a man's independence ; but this 
seems no worse than taking away both his independence and his 
farm. 

A candidate for office in America is generally earnest to obtain the 
vote of some party nominating convention, or, on rare occasions, 
private citizens in concert nominate him, and procure him the support 
of a newspaper and a purse ; he then takes the " stump," or makes 
speeches to those he solicits for his constituents. The party conven- 
tion plays a lesser part in England ; the candidate himself presents 
his name to the electors, and organizes his committee to help him 
canvass the district. Here is an illustration : — 

" TO THE ELECTORS OF THE EASTERN DIVISION OF ST4FFORD- 

SHIRE. 

"Gentlemen: I take this early opportunity of announcing myself as a 
CANDIDATE to REPRESENT your important District in the ensuing PAR- 
LIAMENT. 

" For upwards of twenty years I have been connected with the county, and 
have furthered its canals, railways, waterworks, and public enterprises gen- 
erally. My interest in the progress of the county is close, personal, and 
permanent. 

" My political opinions are Liberal, and I have always given an active and 
consistent support to the principles advocated by the great Liberal party. 

"I am a warm supporter of Mr. Gladstone, and should vote for the dises- 
tablishment of the Irish Church. This measure of justice conceded, the con- 
stitutional rights so long suspended will again be enjoyed by the people of 
Ireland in common with the other subjects of the Queen. 

"I am prepared to support in Parliament an extensive scheme of National 
Education, believing as I do that knowledge is not merely power, but wealth, 
and that to educate the people is to increase their own means of enjoyment, 
while substantially adding to the productive riches of the country. 

" Should you do me the honor to return me to Parliament as your Repre- 
sentative, the task of watching over the important local affairs of a county, 
in the prosperity of which I am so deeply interested, would be at all times a 
natural and agreeable duty. 

" I am, gentlemen, 

" Your obedient servant, 

" John Robinson M'Clean, 
"Bridgeman Place, Walsall. 

" 10th July, 1868." 

The want of the ballot in England is, next to the want of electors 
and a true electoral spirit, the pressing need. With us the pressing 



416 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

need is some way of escape from the thraldom of caucuses and 
nominating conventions, wherein our candidates are really selected, 
and we have no hope but that one of these may be a good one. 
There is no such thing in England as a vast nominating convention 
to adopt a platform and candidates. From his residence in London 
the head of the party summons his supporters to a private banquet, 
and there the policy stealthily agreed upon becomes the platform of 
the party. Says Brougham, " The game which falls a sacrifice to 
party are the noblest principles ; the nation is deluded, and its 
aristocratic masters ascribe to it their own opinions. The nation 
itself is nothing but a toy and tool of the aristocracy." 

In America the game which falls sacrifice to party is the public 
revenue and the public franchises ; but through the strife of parties we 
generally get the man of our choice, and a promise, at least, of the 
policy we wish. The English have the defective system, and we 
have the defective character under the system. The people can 
reform our politics if they will, but only revolution, or the submis- 
sion of the aristocracy, can reform the English system. 

We all remember how the anti-slavery movement began in this 
Northern country ; an author or two, a preacher or two, a newspaper 
or two, a novel or two, and the Quakers, — these began it. The op- 
position to the anti-slavery party was tremendous, and it came often- 
times from the most pious citizens ; all the religious denominations 
were conservative ; all the staid populations were deprecatory of this 
agitation ; violence, rail-ridings, tar and feathers, were employed to 
stop the hubbub ; it went on ; it conquered the quiet elements one 
by one ; the politicians felt the slow shifting of the wind and tacked 
over ; we suddenly found we were all " there," when each one thought 
only himself " there." 

Not without parallel is the case of the Reform Bill in England, 
which I reproduce from various authorities to show how a political 
reform must be carried in England : the under masses make a noise 
and threaten slaughter, and the upper classes relent in time, the 
politicians of each party taking position according to the best con- 
tingencies. With the latter part of the year 1816 arose a popular 
demand for a reform in the English parliamentary representation. "At 
this time," says Bumford, in his " Life of a Radical," " the writings 
of William Cobbett suddenly became of great authority ; they were 
read on nearly every hearth in the manufacturing districts of South 
Lancashire, in those of Leicester Derby, and Nottingham ; also in 



POLITICS, ETC., ON BOTH SIDES OF THE SEA. 417 

many of the Scottish manufacturing towns. Their influence was 
speedily visible. He directed his readers to the true cause of their 
sufferings, — misgovernment, — and to its proper correction, — parlia- 
mentary reform. Riots soon became scarce, and from that time they 
have never obtained their ancient vogue, with the laborers of 
England." " Let us not descend to be unjust," says one, " let us 
not withhold the homage which, with all the faults of William Cob- 
bett, is still due to his great name. Instead of riots and destruction 
of property, Hampden Clubs were now established in many of our 
large towns, and the villages and districts around them ! Cobbett's 
books were printed in a cheap form ; the laborers read them, and 
thenceforward became deliberate and systematic in their proceedings. 
Nor were there wanting men of their own class to encourage and 
direct the new converts ; the Sunday schools of the preceding thirty 
years had produced many working-men of sufficient talent to become 
readers, writers, and speakers in the village meetings for parliamen- 
tary reform ; some also were found to possess a rude poetic talent, 
which rendered their effusions popular, and bestowed an additional 
charm* on their assemblages ; and by such various means anxious 
listeners at first, and then zealous proselytes, were drawn from the 
cottages of quiet nooks and dingles to the weekly readings and dis- 
courses of the Hampden Clubs. One of these clubs was established 
in 1816, at the small town of Middleton, near Manchester ; and I, 
having been instrumental in its formation, a tolerable reader also, and 
a rather expert writer, was chosen Secretary. The club prospered ; 
the number of members increased ; the funds, raised by subscription 
of a penny a week, became more than sufficient for all outgoings ; 
and taking a bold step we soon rented a chapel, which had been given 
up by a society of Kilhamite Methodists. This place we threw open 
for the religious worship of all sects and parties, and there we held 
our meetings, on the evenings of Monday and Saturday in each 
week. The proceedings of our society, its place of meeting, — singu- 
lar as being the first place of meeting occupied by Reformers (for so in 
those days we were termed), together with the services of religion 
connected with us, drew a considerable share of public attention to 
our transactions, and obtained for the leaders some notoriety. Sev- 
eral meetings of delegates from the surrounding districts were held at 
our chapel, on which occasions the leading reformers of Lancashire 
were generally seen together." 

From these little assemblies, as with our anti-slavery lyceums, the 
53 



418 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

work of reform began, and by dint of vigorous meetings, with op- 
position of all sorts, even to armed force, the workingmen's move- 
ment rolled on till it reached Parliament, with cries of distress and 
with petitions, slowly turning the hearts of the middle class, and, at 
last, after fourteen years it passed the House of Commons and went up 
to the Lords. There it was turned back, amidst the execrations of 
the people, who heard of its failure with despair. 

The confusion in the nation that resulted in this failure is thus 
ably told by Cooke, who, though a partisan, is yet sufficiently accu- 
rate : — 

"The House of Commons immediately passed a vote of confidence 
in those ministers who had carried the Reform Bill. The King inter- 
posed a short prorogation, expressly for the purpose that the bill 
might be again introduced. The speech was couched in terms which 
plainly indicated that the sovereign continued faithful. Every 
method was adopted which could palliate the news of the rejection 
of the bill, and avert the thunder-storm which threatened. The 
Whigs were in a great measure successful ; the lightning did not 
strike the lofty towers of our monarchy, nor strip off the Gothic 
fretwork of our House of Peers ; but strange sights were seen 
throughout the nation ; and a voice had gone forth which told that 
the end was not yet. In London, tens of thousands of men, march- 
ing in close array and crowding all the avenues to the palace ; the 
houses of the Tory peers in a constant state of siege, the peers 
themselves venturing abroad at the danger of their lives ; in the 
metropolis of a generous people, the Duke of Wellington, whose 
reputation is his country's glory, unable to appear without insult 
and, danger ; in a metropolis of a people remarkable for their respect 
to the laws, Lord Londonderry struck senseless from his horse by a 
flight of stones ; in the country, Nottingham Castle, the ancient pos- 
session of the Duke of New Castle given to the flames ; Derby in the 
power of the mob, the gaol destroyed, the houses of the known Tories 
demolished ; the city of Bristol on fire, and Sir Charles Wethercll 
fleeing in disguise by the light of the conflagration. Men of all 
grades banded together in unions, pledged at any cost to obtain Par- 
liamentary reform ; a hundred and fifty thousand assembled at Bir- 
mingham and threatening to march upon London, — these were the 
signs of the times, varied by public meetings all over the country, 
comprehending nearly the whole mass of the middle classes, and a 
large portion of the aristocracy, who joined in the expression of in- 



POLITICS, ETC., ON BOTH SIDES OF THE SEA. 419 

dignaht surprise, that a ' whisper of a faction ' should be allowed to 
render abortive the express desire of a nation." 

The same writer continues : " Well was the national sentiment ex- 
pressed and sustained by the press. Morning and evening did these 
batteries of reform pour their incessant fire, and the noise reverber- 
ated through the kingdom. A very large majority of the journals 
were in the interest of the Whigs and the people, but the combined 
powers of all the rest of these shrink into insignificance, when 
compared with that of the leader of them, a paper which, in the 
pride of conscious power, had styled itself the leading journal of 
Europe. Never was there so tremendous a party engine as the period 
of which we are now treating presents. The receptacle of talent 
sufficient to form three brilliant reputations, backed by the admira- 
tion, the applause, the obedience of a nation, it is impossible to look 
back upon its career without strong excitement ; to see it guiding, 
counselling, exhorting, exciting, moving onwards, exulting in its own 
might ; crushing at a blow the incipient reputation of any Tory in 
whom it discerned talent that might render him formidable, yet 
stooping to cherish and to draw forth into blossom the smallest bud 
that might be discovered amongst its own party. 

14 Its advocacy of the party it espoused was not confined to forci- 
ble leading articles, and to able argument ; in all those numberless 
acts by which a party may be strengthened or injured this journal 
was perfect. The principal conductor of that paper appeared, placed, 
like the listener in the ear of Dionysius, in a focus of sound, whither 
the most secret whisper and the loudest clamor were alike wafted. 
Yet great as was the influence of the ' Times/ it only blew the 
flame, — it did not ignite it. The ' Times ' was supporting the Duke 
of Wellington's administration, and repeating his declaration against 
reform without disapproval, when it caught the murmur of the com- 
ing storm, and with infinite tact prepared to ride it." 

Other symptoms of this great political period in England liken it 
to the news in the North at the capture of Fort Sumter. 

The mail roads were sprinkled over for miles with people who were 
on the watch for news from London ; and the passengers on the tops 
of the coaches shouted the tidings, or threw down handbills to tell 
that the Ministry had resigned. Then was there such mourning 
throughout England as had not been known for many years. Men 
forsook their business to meet and consult what they should do. In 
some places the bells tolled ; in others they were muffled. 



420 THE NEW WOKLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

The ministers resigned on Wednesday. On the morning of Thurs- 
day the news reached Manchester. It was circulated with inconceiv- 
able rapidity, and created a sensation beyond description. Its effect 
upon the markets was startling. Orders were at once countermanded. 
The shopkeepers left their places of business, and ran about asking, 
"What is to be done now?" The working-people in every part of 
the town gathered into little knots, and expressed their hatred of those 
whose intrigues had prevailed over the voice of twenty-four millions 
of people. A public meeting was held in the Town Hall, and a 
petition to the House of Commons unanimously agreed to. The 
petition prayed the House of Commons that they would assert their 
own collective dignity, and the indefeasible right of their fellow-sub- 
jects by determined adherence to the bill, and by refusing to vote 
any supplies until a measure essential to the happiness of the people 
and the safety of the throne should be carried into a law. 

By such determined proceedings must every reform be carried in 
Great Britain, and yet the triumph of the Reform Bill is hailed with 
joy by almost every Englishman now. In 1866, when John Bright was 
hailed by his constituents of Birmingham with the gladness of a 
might} 7 multitude, a scene transpired to show how well the English 
masses recollected that vital campaign. It was an open-air meeting ; 
two hundred thousand people were present ; all was enthusiasm. 
The incident was thus described by an eye-witness : — 

"It was at Newhall Hill that the most interesting event of the day 
occurred. This spot was, ♦thirty-four years ago, the scene of the cel- 
ebrated meeting of the union. The purpose of the assembly of the 
7th of May, 1832, was to petition the House of Lords to pass Earl 
Grey's Reform Bill. The hill at that day was unbuilt upon, and cov- 
ered twelve acres in extent. In dismissing the meeting its chairman, 
Mr. Atwood, used these words : 8 My good friends, before we depart 
I will call upon you again to exhibit a spectacle of loyalty and devo- 
tion. Our good King is entitled to the deepest gratitude of his peo- 
ple. I therefore desire that you will, all of you, take off your hats^ 
and that you will lift up your eyes to heaven where the just God 
rules over heaven and earth ; and that you will, all of } r ou, cry out 
with one heart and voice, " God bless the King ! " ' The united prayer 
went up with a sound as of thunder. It was upon this spot where 
the meeting to which we have thus alluded was held, that an event 
occurred to-day to which allusion must be made. Here four cross- 
roads meet, and as far as the eye could reach there was but one dense 



POLITICS, ETC., ON BOTH SIDES OF THE SEA. 421 

mass of people, — every avenue being choked with human beings. 
The carriage containing Mr. Bright was here stopped, and the hon- 
orable gentleman mounted the seat of the vehicle, and, amid the 
greatest excitement and cheering, pointed with his hand up Newhall 
Hill. The allusion was understood by the thousands w r ho witnessed 
the act, and it was the signal for some of the most deafening 
cheers we have ever heard." 

During the American war I attended several of the great meetings 
of sympathy with the United States, at Exeter Hall and at St. 
James' Hall. There were no bands, no banners, — only representative 
orators like Bright, Thompson, Stanfield, and Beals, and an immense 
outpouring of the working-classes, all earnest, decorous, and honest. 
I felt that others might claim to be our friends, but that these were 
so. Amongst them were various young " snobs" and students, say- 
ing surly things against America and making diversions. One of 
these said : — 

" That Lincoln's only a rail-splitter and a boatman." 

" Well ! " said a workingman, " I think the Americans were quite 
right in doing honor to a poor man, one of themselves." 

"Who's here for America?" said the other, — "Nobodies like 
Newman Hall." 

" New. man Hall a nobody," said the workingman, quickly, "then 
perhaps you are nobody ! And what is Saptist Noel ? " 

" Oh ! Baptist Noel is a gentleman, I confess ! " 

Baptist Noel, though a friend of America, was the relative of a 
nobleman, and not the former fact, but the latter, made him a gentle- 
man. 

To sketch an English election is a legitimate topic of this chapter ; 
but I know of no place where there is a consecutive account of an 
actual parliamentary borough contest to be found, and therefore rely 
upon that of Thackeray in his story of " The Newcomes," which is cir- 
cumstantial, life-like, and curiously descriptive of English manners 
and habits. The occasion was a family quarrel between Colonel Tom 
Newcome arid his nephew Sir Barnes Newcome, which led to the 
former going into the latter's district with an eccentric electioneering 
friend, Fred Bayham, to beat Sir Barnes for Parliament : — 

" There were four candidates in the field for the representation of that 
borough. That old and tried member of Parliament, Mr. Bunce, was 
considered to be secure ; and the baronet's seat was thought to be 
pretty safe, on account of his influence in the place. Nevertheless, 



422 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

Thomas Newcome's supporters were confident for their champion, and 
that, when the parties came to the poll, the extreme Liberals of the 
borough would divide their votes between him and the fourth candi- 
date, the uncompromising Radical, Mr. Barker. 

" In due time the Colonel and his staff arrived at Newcome, and re- 
sumed the active canvass which they had commenced some months 
previously. The lawyer, the editor of the ' Independent,' and F. 
B., the adventurer, were the Colonel's chief men. His head-quarters 
(which F. B. liked very well) were at the hotel where we last saw 
them, and whence issuing with his aide-de-camp at his heels, the Colo- 
nel went round, to canvass personally, according to his promise, 
every free and independent elector of the borough. Barnes, his rela- 
tive and opponent too, was canvassing eagerly on his side, and was 
most affable and active ; the two parties would often meet nose to 
nose in the same street, and their retainers exchange looks of defi- 
ance. With Mr. Polts, of the ' Independent,' a big man, on his 
left ; with Mr, Fredereck, a still bigger man, on his right ; his own 
trusty bamboo cane in his hand, before which poor Barnes had shrunk 
abashed ere now, Colonel Newcome had commonly the best of these 
street encounters, and frowned his nephew, Barnes, and Barnes's staff 
off the pavement. With the non-electors, the Colonel was a decided 
favorite ; the boys invariably hurrahed him ; whereas they jeered and 
uttered ironical cries after* poor Barnes, asking, c Who beat his wife? 
Who drove his children to the work-house ? ' and other unkind per- 
sonal questions. The working-man upon whom the libertine Barnes 
had inflicted so cruel an injury in his early days was now the baronet's 
bitterest enemy. He assailed him with curses and threats when they 
met, and leagued his brother workmen against him. The wretched 
Sir Barnes owned with contrition that the sins of his youth pursued 
him ; his enemy scoffed at the idea of Barnes's repentance ; he was 
not moved at the grief, the punishment in his own family ; the humil- 
iation and remorse which the repentant prodigal piteously pleaded. 
No man was louder in his cries of mea culpa than Barnes ; no man 
professed a more edifying repentance. He was hat in hand to every 
black coat (preachers), established or dissenting. Repentance was 
to his interest, to be sure ; but yet let us hope it was sincere. There 
is some hypocrisy, of which one does not like even to entertain the 
thought ; especially that awful falsehood which trades with divine 
truth, and takes the name of Heaven in vain. 

" The Roebuck Inn, at Newcome, stands in the market-place, directly 



POLITICS, ETC., ON BOTH SIDES OF THE SEA. 423 

facing the King's Arms, where, as we know, Colonel Newcome and 
uncompromising toleration held their head-quarters. Immense ban- 
ners of blue and yellow floated from every window of the King's 
Arms, and decorated the balcony from which the Colonel and his as- 
sistants were in the habit of addressing the multitude. Fiddlers and 
trumpeters arrayed in his colors paraded the town, and enlivened it 
with their melodious strains. Other trumpeters and fiddlers, bearing 
the true-blue cockades and colors of Sir Barnes Newcome, Bart., 
would encounter the Colonel's musicians, on which occasions of meet- 
ing it is to be feared small harmony was produced. They banged 
each other with their brazen instruments. The warlike drummers 
thumped each other's heads in lieu of the professional sheepskin. 
The town-boys and street blackguards rejoiced in these combats, 
and exhibited their valor on one side or the other. The Colonel had 
to pay a long bill for broken brass when he settled the little accounts 
of the election. 

" In after times, F. Bay ham was pleased to describe the circum- 
stances of a contest in which he bore a* most distinguished part. It 
was F. B.'s opinion that his private eloquence brought over many 
waverers to the Colonel's side, and converted numbers of the be- 
nighted followers of Sir Barnes Newcome. Bayham's voice was in- 
deed magnificent, and could be heard from the King's Arms balcony 
above the shout and roar of the multitude*, the gongs and bugles of 
the opposition bands. He was untiring in his oratory, undaunted 
in the presence of the crowds below. He was immensely popular, 
F. B. Whether he laid his hand upon his broad chest, took off his 
hat and waved it, or pressed his blue-and-yellow ribbons to his bosom, 
the crowd shouted, ' Hurra ! silence ! bravo ! Bayham forever ! ' 
4 They would have carried me in triumph,' said F. B. ' If I had but 
the necessary qualification I might be member for Newcome this day, 
or any other I chose.' 

" I am afraid in this conduct of the Colonel's election Mr. Ba} T ham 
resorted to acts of which his principal certainly would disapprove, 
and engaged auxiliaries whose alliance was scarcely creditable. 
Whose was the hand that flung the potato which struck Sir Barnes 
Newcome, Bart., on the nose as he was haranguing the people from 
the Roebuck ? How came it that whenever Sir Barnes and his friends 
essayed to speak, such an awful yelling and groaning took place in 
the crowd below, that the words of those feeble orators were inaudi- 
ble? Who smashed all the front window s of the Roebuck? Colonel 



424: THE NEW WOULD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

Newcome had not words to express his indignation at proceedings 
so unfair. When Sir Barnes and his staff were hustled in the market- 
place and most outrageously shoved, jeered, and jolted, the Colonel 
from the King's Arms organized a rapid sally, which he himself 
headed with his bamboo cane ; cut out Sir Barnes and his followers 
from the hands of the mob, and addressed those ruffians in a noble 
speech, of which the ' bamboo cane,' ' Englishman/ ' shame/ ' fair- 
play/ were the most emphatic expressions. The mob cheered old 
Tom, as they called him ; they made way for Sir Barnes, who shrunk 
pale and shuddering back into his hotel again, — who always persisted 
in saying that that old villain of a dragoon had planned both the 
assault and the rescue. 

" ' When the dregs of the people, — the scum of the rabble, sir, 
banded together by the myrmidons of Sir Barnes Newcome, attacked 
us at the King's Arms, and smashed ninety-six pounds' worth of glass 
at one volley, besides knocking off the gold unicorn's head and the tail 
of the British lion ; it was fine, sir/ F. B. said, 4 to see how the 
Colonel came forward, and the coolness of the old boy. in the midst 
of the action. He stood there in front, sir, with his old hat off, never 
so much as once bobbing his old head, and I think he spoke rather 
better under fire than he did when there was no danger. Between 
ourselves, he aint much of a speaker, the old Colonel ; he hems and 
haws, and repeats himself a good deal. He hasn't the gift of natural 
eloquence which some men have. You should have heard my 
speech, sir, on the Thursday in the Town Hall, — that was some- 
thing like a speech. Potts was jealous of it, and always reported me 
most shamefully.' 

" In spite of his respectable behavior to the gentlemen in black 
coats, his soup tickets and his flannel tickets, his own pathetic lec- 
tures and 'his sedulous attendance at other folks' sermons, poor 
Barnes could not keep up his credit with the serious interest at New- 
come, and the meeting-houses and their respective pastors and fre- 
quenters turned their backs upon him. The case against him was too 
flagrant ; his enemy, the factory-man, worked it with an extraordinary 
skill, malice, and pertinacity. Not a single man, woman, or child in 
Newcome but was made acquainted with Sir Barnes's early peccadillo. 
Ribald ballads were howled through the streets describing his sin 
and his deserved punishment. For very shame, the reverend dissent- 
ing gentlemen were obliged to refrain from voting for him ; such as 
ventured, believing in the sincerity of his repentan'ce, to give him 



POLITICS, ETC., ON BOTH SIDES OF THE SEA. 425 

their voices, were yelled aw'ay from the polling-places. A very great 
number who would have been his friends, were compelled to bow to 
decency and public opinion, and supported the Colonel. 

" Hooted away from the hustings, and the public places whence the 
rival candidates addressed the free and independent electors, this 
wretched and persecuted Sir Barnes invited his friends and supporters 
to meet him at the Athenaeum Room, — scene of his previous eloquent 
performances. But, though this apartment was defended by tickets, 
the people burst into it ; and Nemesis, in the shape of the persever- 
ing factory-man, appeared before the scared Sir Barnes and his puz- 
zled committee. The man stood up and bearded the pale baronet. 
He had a good cause, and was in truth a far better master of debate 
than our banking friend, being a great speaker among his brother 
operatives, by whom political questions are discussed, and the con- 
duct of political men examined, with a ceaseless interest, and with an 
order and eloquence which are often unknown in what is called supe- 
rior society. This man and his friends round about him fiercely 
silenced the clamor of ' Turn him out,' with which his first appear- 
ance was assailed by Sir Barnes's hangers-on. He said, in the name 
of justice he would speak up ; if they were fathers of families and 
loved their wives and daughters he dared them to refuse him a hear- 
ing. Did they love their wives and their children ? It was a shame 
that they should take such a man as that yonder for their representa- 
tive in Parliament. But the greatest sensation he made was when in 
the middle of his speech, after inveighing against Barnes's cruelty 
and parental ingratitude, he asked, ' Where were Barnes's children?' 
and actually thrust forward two, to the amazement of the committee 
and the ghastly astonishment of the guilty baronet himself. 

" c Look at them,' says the man ; ' they are almost in rags ; they 
have to put up with scanty and hard food ; contrast them with his 
other children, whom you see lording in gilt carriages, robed in pur- 
ple and fine linen, and scattering mud from their wheels over us hum- 
ble people as we walk the streets ; ignorance and starvation is good 
enough for these, for those others nothing can be too fine or too dear. 
What can a factory girl expect from such a fine, high-bred, white- 
handed, aristocratic gentleman as Sir Barnes Newcome, Baronet, but 
to be cajoled, and seduced, and deserted, and left to starve? When 
she has served my lord's pleasure, her natural -fate is to be turned 
into the streets ; let her go and rot there, and her children beg in the 

gutter.' 

54 



426 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

" ' This is the most shameful imposture,' gasps out Sir Barnes ; 
4 these children are not — are not — ' 

" The man interrupted him with a bitter laugh. 

" 4 No,' saj^s he, ' they are not his ; that's true enough, friends. 
It's Tom Martin's girl and boy, — a precious pair of lazy little scamps. 
But at first he thought they were his children. See how much he 
knows about them ! He hasn't seen his children for years ; he would 
have left them and their mother to starve and die, but for shame and 
fear. The old man, his father, pensioned them, and he hasn't the 
heart to stop their wages now. Men of Newcome, will you have 
this man to represent you in Parliament ? ' and the crowd roared out, 
4 No ; ' and Barnes and his shame-faced committee slunk out of the 
place, and no wonder the dissenting clerical gentlemen were shy of 
voting for him. 

"A brilliant and picturesque diversion in Colonel Newcome's favor 
was due to the inventive genius of his faithful aide-de-camp, F. B, 
On the polling-day, as the carriages full of voters came up to the 
market-place, there appeared nigh to the booths an open barouche v 
covered all over with ribbon, and containing Frederick Bayham, Esq., 
profusely decorated with the Colonel's colors, and a very old woman 
and her female attendant, who were similarly ornamented. It was 
good old Mrs. Mason, who was pleased with the drive and the sun- 
shine, though she scarcely understood the meaning of the turmoil, 
with her maid by her side, delighted to wear such ribbons, and sit in 
such a post of honor. Rising up in the carriage, F. B. took off his 
hat, bade his men of brass be silent, who were accustomed to bray 
c See the Conquering Hero comes,' whenever the Colonel or Mr. 
Bayham, his brilliant aide-de-camp, made their appearance, — bidding, 
we say, the musicians and the universe to be silent, F. B. rose, and 
made the citizens of Newcome a splendid speech. Good, old, uncon- 
scious Mrs. Mason was the theme of it, and the Colonel's virtues and 
faithful gratitude in tending her. She was his father's old friend. 
She was Sir Barnes Newcome's grandfather's old friend. She had 
lived for more than forty years at Sir Barnes Newcome's door, and 
how often had he been to see her ? Did he go every week ? No. 
Every month? No. Every year? No. Never in the whole course 
of his life had he set his foot into her doors ! (Loud yells, and cries 
of ' shame.') Never had he done her one single act of kindness. 
Whereas for years and years past, when he was away in India, 
heroically fighting the battles of his country, when he was dis- 



POLITICS, ETC., ON BOTH SIDES OF THE SEA. 427 

tinguishing himself at Assaye, and — and — Mulligatawny, and 
Seringapatam, in the hottest of the fight, and the fiercest of the dan- 
ger, in the most terrible moment of the conflict, and the crowning 
glory of the victory, the good, the brave, the kind old Colonel, — 
why should he say Colonel? why should he not say Old Tom at once? 
(Immense roars of applause) — always remembered his dear old nurse 
and friend. ' Look at that shawl, boys, which she has got on ! My 
belief is that Colonel Newcome took that shawl in single combat, 
and on horseback, from the prime-minister of Tippoo Saib. (Immense 
cheers and cries of u Bravo, Bayham ! ") Look at that brooch the 
dear old thing wears ! (He kissed her hand while so apostrophizing 
her.) Tom Newcome never brags about his military achievements, 
he is the most modest as well as the bravest man in the world ; what 
if I were to tell you that he cut that brooch from the throat of an 
Indian rajah? He's man enough to do it. (" He is ; he is ; " from all 
parts of the crowd.) What, you want to take the horses out, do you? 
(To the crowd, who were removing those quadrupeds.) I aint 
a-going to prevent you ; I expected as much of you. Men of Newcome, 
I expected as much of you, for I know you ! Sit still, old lady ; 
don't be frightened, ma'am, they are only going to pull you to the 
King's Arms, and show you to the Colonel.' 

" This, indeed, was the direction in which the mob (whether influ- 
enced by spontaneous enthusiasm, or excited by cunning agents 
placed among the populace by F. B., I cannot say) now took the 
barouche and its three occupants. With a myriad roar and shout the 
carriage was dragged up in front of the King's Arms, from the bal« 
conies of which a most satisfactory account of the polling was already 
placarded. The extra noise and shouting brought out the Colonel, 
who looked at first with curiosity at the advancing procession, and 
then, as he caught sight of Sarah Mason, with a blush and a bow of 
his kind old head. 

" c Look at him, boys ! ' cried the enraptured F. B., pointing up to 
the old man. ' Look at him ; the dear old boy ! Isn't he an old 
trump ? Which will you have for your member, Barnes Newcome or 
Old Tom?' 

" And as might be supposed, an immense shout of c Old Tom ! ' 
arose from the multitude ; in the midst of which, blushing and bow- 
ing still, the Colonel went back to his committee-room ; and the 
bands played ' See the Conquering Hero ' louder than ever ; and 
poor Barnes, in the course of his duty having to come out upon his 



428 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD* 

balcony at the Roebuck opposite, was saluted with a yell as vocifer- 
ous as the cheer for the Colonel had been ; and old Mrs. Mason asked 
what the noise was about ; and after making several vain efforts, in 
dumb show, to the crowd, Barnes slunk back into his hole again as 
pale as the turnip which was flung at his head ; and the horses were 
brought, and Mrs. Mason driven home, and the day of election came 
to an end. 

u Not exactly knowing what his politics were when he commenced 
the canvass, I can't say to what opinions the poor Colonel did not find 
himself committed by the time when the election was over. The 
worthy gentleman felt himself not a little humiliated by what he had 
to say and to unsay, by having to answer questions, to submit to 
familiarities, to shake hands, which, to say the truth, he did not care 
for grasping at all. His habits were aristocratic ; his education had 
been military ; the kindest and simplest soul alive, he yet disliked all 
familiarity, and expected from common people the sort of deference 
which he had received from his men in the regiment." 



CHAPTEE XVI. 

THE PEOPLE AS AFFECTED BY THE TWO GOVERNMENTS. 

An estimate of the effect of the British monarchy upon the masses of the people, and of 
the effect of the United States constitution upon the wealthy and intelligent. — The con- 
trary considered. — How far are the representative English and American characters the 
work of their governments. 

We have now nearly reached the end of comparison between Eng- 
land and America as nations. The term England has been used 
throughout, as it was the parent kingdom and cast most of the insti- 
tutions of its consorts, and the name is better known in America than 
the proper title of " The United Kingdom." There are many condi- 
tions of life in both countries for which the state is not responsible. 
There are many abuses in both countries neither anticipated in the 
institutions of either, nor growing out of them. There is certainly 
nothing evil in England for which America is responsible, unless it 
be a part of her national debt contracted in one attempt to enslave 
us, and in another to intimidate us, and the balance has been struck 
by the present prosperous condition of British commerce, wilich nearly 
absorbed the whole of our own during our latest struggle for exist- 
ence. To America, on the contrary, England as a state is responsi- 
ble for much that might have hindered our progress, not the least 
remarkable of which endowments was slavery itself. Many reminis- 
cences of her own social life have retarded the true growth of this 
country as a republic. We have had to weed out nearly all the dis- 
tinctive English features of polity which remained after our war of 
independence, — the love of broad estates, and the haughty wish for 
many tenants and servants, for deference and distance between men, 
and distance between governors and governed, for large state powers 
reserved and held to influence public action, — the thousand little 
things which make the English notion of essentials, but are to a new 
and democratic state the conceits and trappings of a boy. We 
shook off the state church, the privy council, primogeniture, the mys- 
tery of the " presence," and kept chiefly the English common law for 

429 



430 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

the administration of justice. And we have scarcely made a single 
step backward toward England since that period, while England has 
never made one great progressive step but in our direction, unless it 
be Free Trade. The contest between the two sets of institutions has 
been like the first trial between the paddle-wheel steamship and the 
screw steamship. They were hitched together stern to stern, and 
bets ran high as to how many screws the paddle-wheels could tow ; 
the little screw, however, carried off the elder style of ship before 
they could adjust the bets. There can be no coming changes in the 
English government which will not be in our direction. Already life- 
peerages are mooted, and a life peer is only a longer sort of senator. 
The ballot must come, also, for it is more necessary for England than 
for us. Few men are in fear of losing farm or emploj-ment here for 
voting against landlord or employer ; besides, the ballot in England 
would counteract servility, which permeates English society up to the 
top grade of tradesmen, and often higher. A servile fellow would 
carry a weapon with the ballot, with which he might give vent to his 
feelings sometimes ; for a thoroughly fawning nation is no improve- 
ment upon a treacherous one. 

The principle of English government is, no matter how the lower 
classes exist, so the ruling class is wise ; but what wise man would not 
wish to be rid of the responsibility of ruling a million of poor and vulgar 
people ? Our principle is, secure the greatest good to the many, though 
the few governors fare ill ; for if it be so sweet in England merely to rule 
and assume all the responsibility for the disfranchised, then our ill-paid 
American office-holders must be partly paid in the pleasure of place. 
The sensitiveness of English opinion upon the question of arming the 
poor with the unit of government, the ballot, is ludicrous. An ency- 
clopaedia issued by the Scotch publishers, Chambers, of London and 
Edinburgh, and reissued here (1869), where it will do no harm, says, 
" If the suffrage were universal, the laboring class interest would be 
the predominant one, and serious would be the danger of class legis- 
lation as a result ! " This is written in England, where, of course, 
there has never been class legislation ! But class legislation is in- 
deed serious, though it is questionable whether the laboring men be 
a class ; for in America every man labors. The distress in England 
is that there has been class government altogether, and the govern- 
ment of the smallest, least laborious, and therefore least humanized 
class. If there be a vulgar class there, not fit to hold the unit of 
government, they are vulgar because the government of the few wise 



THE PEOPLE AS AFFECTED BY THE GOVERNMENTS. 431 

has never given them schools, nor access to social and administrative 
opportunity. The few have not been wise enough to make the many 
worthy. The wise few have hidden their talents of charity in the 
napkins of the court-table ; they have been selfish, haughty, and un- 
just toward their fellow-countrymen, and the exodus from the British 
kingdom to America is like that of the oppressed Israelites from 
Egypt ; in the western promised land they find no wise class to rule 
them, but undertake to be that class themselves. 

Let this be accounted for. If English institutions are superior 
to ours, why have they failed to attract the millions of British sub- 
jects who have come to America? With more land in North Amer- 
ica than we have, with nearly all India and Oceanica, and parts of 
all zones for colonies, why have the Queen's subjects failed to see the 
advantage of dominions ruled by her own roj^ally-appointed Govern- 
ors, — themselves of the wise few, — and come instead to a land 
where, if all English literature be true, there is corruption, violence, 
instability, miasma, — a land, in short, such as Mr. Charles Dickens 
sketched in " Martin Chuzzlewit" ? 

It was the magic name of Freedom that attracted them ; not only 
freedom in life, wages, and locomotion, but freedom in the higher 
sense of equal chance before the law and before the fact, — the men- 
tion of a nation which, was not diked and ditched with deference, and 
tradition, and made impregnable to the lowly in its central citadels ; 
a nation where Silas Wright, or Carl Schurz, or David Broclei ick, 
could be a senator or the peer of one. And by all recent accounts 
of English critics, who have taken a marvellous liking to us of late, 
we, thus composite, are the most enlightened nation on the globe ; for 
so we were named by Lord Houghton at a banquet in 1869. 

What was the origin of this wise class in England, — too wise to be 
of account with only the unit of government, one ballot, for a 
weapon? Fischel, the German critic, says, upon authority, that 
" after the battle of Tewkesbury, a Norman baron was almost as rare 
in England as a wolf is now. When Henry VII. called his first Par- 
liament, there were only twenty-nine temporal peers to be found ; of 
those twenty-nine not five remain, and they, as the Howards, for in- 
stance, are not Norman nobility. A peer with an old genealogical 
tree is accordingly something unheard of; the real old families of the 
country are to be found among the peasantry. The gentry, too, may 
lay some claim to old blood. We owe the present peerage to three 
sources : the spoliation of the Church under Henry VIII., the open and 



4:32 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

flagrant sale of its honors by the elder Stuarts, and the borough- 
mongering of our own times. 

" Nothing is more amusing," he continues, " than to read the 
apocryphal genealogies paraded in the peerage. The family of Lord 
Holland (Fox) , according to Collins' ' Handbook of the Nobility/ were 
a distinguished tribe in England previous to the Conquest ; but the 
Fox family itself, more modest, alleges that it derives its origin from 
a certain Palafox, who, in 1588, was driven ashore from the Spanish 
Armada. The real origin of the family is involved in obscurity ; 
according to some, the founder was a chorister of Salisbury Cathe- 
dral, in the reign of Charles II. ; others contending that he was a 
body-servant of this King." 

Now, it has taken from two to five hundred years under the Eng- 
lish government to make such laborers members of the ruling class, 
and we often find them wise enough in twenty. There is an English 
blacksmith, named Robert Collyer, in Chicago, whom we esteem good 
enough to fill the pulpit of Theodore Parker. How many years 
would it have taken him to have been wise enough to preach in the 
Chapel Royal? 

English institutions are of a character to repress the aspirations of 
the lowly, and make them feel that the higher uses of man are too 
high for them to strive for. The French authority we have so often 
quoted admits that on passing from a country in which free institu- 
tions are established to one where they do not exist, the traveller is 
struck by the change ; in the former all is bustle and activity ; in the 
latter everything is calm and motionless. In the one, amelioration 
and progress are the general topics of inquiry ; in the other, it seems 
as if the community only aspired to repose in the enjoyment of the 
advantages which it has acquired. Nevertheless, the country which 
exerts itself so strenuously to promote its welfare is generally more 
wealthy and more prosperous than that which appears to be so con- 
tented with its lot ; and when we compare them together, we can 
scarcely conceive how so many new wants are daily felt in the former, 
whilst s.o few seem to occur in the latter. It cannot be our climate, 
which few Europeans like, nor our race, which our parent race has so 
frequently reprobated, that has made us reconstructors of the lost 
commonalty of England, — " those Irishmen who only brawl, those 
English helots who love only bitter beer," — it is the vigorous nature 
of our institutions which are not reformatory but inspiring ; which are 
no royal charities, but which compel emulation by universal emulation. 



THE PEOPLE AS AFFECTED BY THE GOVERNMENTS. 433 

" In no country on earth is an old nationality so soon absorbed as 
in America," observes an Englishman. " I am inclined to think the 
regard professed for England by American literary men is senti- 
mental, and is produced by education and study, rather than by any 
feeling transmitted in families or by society." 

The men who founded our government were as thoroughly reviled 
at the time by English critics as those who govern it now continue to 
be by Englishmen ; descendants of the kindred of " Praise God Bare- 
bones," and the reviled class of that time, they proved worthy of 
De Tocqueville's splendid eulogium : — 

" On the continent of Europe, at the beginning of the seventeenth 
century, absolute monarchy had eve^where triumphed over the ruins 
of the oligarchical and feudal liberties of the Middle Ages. Never 
were the notions of right more completely confounded than in the 
midst of the splendor and literature of Europe ; never was there less 
political activity among the people ; never were the principles of true 
freedom less widely circulated ; and at that very time, those princi- 
ples, which were scorned or unknown by the nations of Europe, were 
proclaimed in the deserts of the New World, and were accepted as 
the future creed of a great people. The boldest theories of the 
human reason were put into practice by a community so humble, that 
not a statesman condescended to attend to it ; and „a legislation 
without a precedent was produced off-hand by the imagination of the 
citizens." 

Another feature of English government is, that, existing with 
reserved privileges for the few, who become the objects of all admira- 
tion, the hearts of the whole middle class in England are turned 
upward toward the aristocracy and away from the poor million at 
their feet. The dream of rank enters the brain of the tradesman, 
and he takes a taste of its realities in advance by kicking the next 
class below him. There is not on the globe so cruel a race as the 
English ; they hang their criminals on the open street to make the 
sight of death popular ; they give such sentences for petty offences 
as are elsewhere given for the highest crimes ; we can fight rebellion 
five years and hang no man ; but for a freak of a few poor Fenians 
they are hung dangling over the battlements of Manchester jail. 
Hawthorne, who had a literary weakness for the English nation, said 
that " a true Englishman is a kind man at heart, but has an uncon- 
querable dislike to poverty and beggar}^. Beggars have heretofore 
been so strange to an American that he is apt to become their prey, 
55 



434 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

being recognized through his national peculiarities, and beset by 
them in the streets. The English smile at him, and say that there 
are ample public arrangements for every pauper's possible need ; that 
street charity promotes idleness and vice, and that yonder personifi- 
cation of misery on the pavement will lay up a good clay's profit, 
besides supping more luxuriously than the dupe who gives him a 
shilling. By and by the stranger adopts their theory and begins to 
practise upon it, much to his own temporary freedom from annoy- 
ance, but not entirely without moral detriment, or sometimes a too 
late contrition. Years afterwards, it may be, his memory is still 
haunted by some vindictive wretch whose cheeks were pale and hun- 
ger-pinched." 

This sense of reduction to hereditary brutality is the reason, per- 
haps, of the fondness of the lower English classes for prize-fighting, 
tlog- fighting, cock-fighting, and jockej 7 ing at horse races ; for many 
of these poor beings, permeated, like the whole of society, with rever- 
ence for the aristocracy, feel honored to climb to the social place of 
a ducal game-chicken or a royal bull-dog. Prize fighting in America 
has, it is believed, never had an American votary ; all our bruisers 
have been imported, and have fought under " patronage." Parlia- 
ment adjourns to attend a horse-race ; " Guy Livingstone " was a 
popular book in England, brutal as it was, because it was a truthful 
representation of English detestation for the poor and the plebeian. 
One often hears, in that country, of some "gentleman" founding a 
hospital or a school ; but what rich tradesman has done it, except 
George Peabody, of Massachusetts, who went at once to the relief of 
the London poor and the unlettered freed negroes of America? 
Another defect of the aristocratic government is, that it puts the 
mind of society upon trifles, to the prejudice of such manly questions 
as should make citizens. Witness this royal farce : — 

The King of Hanover at the Prince of Wales' baptism, if I mis- 
take not, was very anxious to sign the paper before Prince Albert, 
and when the Queen approached the table he placed himself by her 
side, watching his opportunity. She knew very well what he was 
about, and just as the Archbishop was giving her the pen, she sud- 
denly dodged around the table, placed herself next to the Prince, 
then quickly took the pen from the Archbishop, signed, and gave it 
to Prince Albert, who also signed next, before it could be prevented. 
" The Queen," said Wellington, u was also very anxious to give the 
precedence at court to King Leopold, before the King of Hanover, 



THE PEOPLE AS AFFECTED BY THE GOVERNMENTS. 435 

and she consulted me about it, and how it should be arranged, j 
told Her Majesty that I supposed it should be settled, as we did at 
the Congress of Vienna. * How was that,' said she, — ' by first arrival ? ' 
— < No, ma' am/ said I ; ' alphabetically, and then, you know, B comes 
before H.' This pleased her very much, and it was done." 

The above were grown-up people. 

Throughout English society this reverence for triviality goes, 
fostered by the form of government ; for the huge and beefy English- 
man would be almost devoid of a love of antiquity and sentiment, 
were it not kept alive by the worship of a rich aristocracy descended 
from antiquity. Hawthorne shows how this recognition of haber- 
dashery is maintained at the banquets of the Lord Mayor, of London : — 

" There stood a man in armor, with a helmet on his head, behind 
his Lordship's chair. When the after-dinner wine was placed on the 
table, still another official personage appeared behind the chair, and 
proceeded to make a solemn and sonorous proclamation, ending in 
some such style as this : ' And other gentlemen and ladies, here 
present, the Lord Mayor drinks to you all in a loving cup/ — giving 
a sort of sentimental twang to the two words, — i and sends it round 
among you ! ' And forthwith, the loving cup — several of them, 
indeed, on each side of the tables — came slowly down with all the 
antique ceremony. 

" The fashion of it is thus : The Lord Mayor, standing up and 
taking the covered cup in both hands, presents it to the guest at his 
elbow, who likewise rises, and removes the cover for his lordship to 
drink, which being successfully accomplished, the guest replaces the 
cover and receives the cup into his own hands. He then presents it 
to his next neighbor, that the cover may be again removed for him- 
self to take a draught ; after which the third person goes through a 
similar manoeuvre with a fourth, and he with a fifth, until the whole 
company find themselves inextricably intertwisted and entangled in 
one complicated chain of love. When the cup came to my hands, I 
examined it critically, both inside and out, and perceived it to be an 
antique and richly ornamented silver goblet, capable of holding about 
a quart of wine. Considering how much trouble we all expended in 
getting the cup to our lips, the guests appeared to content themselves 
with wonderfulty moderate potations. In truth, nearly or quite the 
original quart of wine being still in the goblet, it seemed doubtful 
whether any of the company had more than barely touched the silver 
rim before passing it to their neighbors, — a degree of abstinence 



436 THE NEW WORLD COMPAEED WITH THE OLD. 

that might be accounted for by a fastidious repugnance to so many 
ingredients in one cup, or possibly by a disapprobation of the liquor. 
Being curious to know all about these important matters, with a view 
of recommending to my countrymen whatever they might useful!}' 
adopt, I drank an honest sip from the loving cup, and had no occasion 
for another, — ascertaining it to be claret of a poor original quality, 
largely mingled with water, and spiced and sweetened. ,, 

Further than this, the court and aristocracy being the theme of all 
panegyric, and their manners and habits matters of imitation, the 
notorious vices of both in many cases tend to debauch an entire gen- 
eration. We have no court in America, and no aristocracy that is 
recognized except by itself. There have been chief magistrates who 
had their troubles, domestic and otherwise, but they hid them from 
the public eye, and suffered in silence, unwilling to be evil examples 
to their generation. There has probably never been in American 
society so flagrant cases of profligacy and meanness as have dis- 
graced the English throne : William of Orange entering the kingdom 
with his one wife and two mistresses ; all the male Brunswickers un- 
chaste, and the fourth George the hero of a divorce court. This 
latter episode is worthy of reproduction, and is mildly told by a his- 
torian : — 

" George III. died January 24, 1820, after a reign of sixty years. 
He was succeeded by the Prince Regent, whose coronation was one 
of the most magnificent that England had witnessed for many years. 
Circumstances, however, occurred, that excited the populace, and re- 
vived unpleasant remembrances, of the early career of the King. 
When only Prince of Wales, George IV., in opposition to the Royal 
Marriage Act, had married Mrs. Fitzherbert, a Catholic. His father 
refused to acknowledge the marriage ; but many persons of the high- 
est rank, members of the roj^al family even, showed their disapproba- 
tion of the statute by visiting that lady, and treating her as the 
prince's lawful wife. George, however, was faithless ; and Mrs. 
Fitzherbert left him forever. Embarrassed with debts to the amount 
of more than six hundred and thirty thousand pounds, the Prince, in 
1795, consented to marry Caroline, the second daughter of the Duke 
of Brunswick, Wolfenbuttel. The Prince had concluded, from his 
father's expressions, that his debts would be paid, and his income in- 
creased. He was disappointed ; the income was indeed raised from 
seventy-five thousand to a hundred and thirty-eight thousand pounds ; 
but this increase was applied to the liquidation of his debts. The 



THE PEOPLE AS AFFECTED BY THE GOVERNMENTS. 437 

Prince became embittered against his young wife ; bickerings arose, 
and a separation followed. After dwelling many years upon the 
continent, Caroline heard of the death of George III., and hastened 
to England to claim a share of the throne of her husband. She was 
threatened with a prosecution if she presumed to set foot in the 
country ; but she heeded not. Her arrival was welcomed with enthu- 
siastic joy by the opposition and the bulk of the people. 

" A bill of pains and penalties against her was introduced in the 
House of Lords on July the 5th, 1820. Brougham and Denman were 
her counsel ; and by their address and eloquence they laid the foun- 
dation of their future advancement. Week after week the examina- 
tion of evidence continued ; but if the Queen's conduct had been 
unbecoming, that of her husband was notoriously worse The pub- 
lic, therefore, paid little attention to the charges against her ; but 
denounced the injustice of the divorce, and the cruelty that ever since 
that event had surrounded her with spies, and by a variety of means 
had blackened her reputation in the face of Europe. The ministers 
became alarmed at the general clamor, and still more at the increas- 
ing diminution of their supporters in the Lords. At the second 
reading the bill was passed, by a majority of twenty-eight ; but at 
the third reading, out of two hundred and eighteen peers, the minis- 
ters had a majority of only nine. They therefore deemed it prudent 
to abandon their project. A general illumination announced the joy 
of the people. Woe to the windows that were dark that night ! 

" In the following year the coronation took place, and Caroline pre- 
sented herself at the Abbey gates, but was repulsed by the guard. 
The shock was too much for her ; in a few days she closed her un- 
happy career. The populace paid to her remains the last rough 
tribute of their sympathy. Her body was to be interred in her 
native land ; but orders were given that it should not pass through 
the city. The crowd determined that it should, and, after much 
tumult and some conflicts with the military, they gained their 
point." 

The United States government calls private citizens of exalted 
vigilance and wide experience to political place, whatever be their 
grade in social life ; the citizen is therefore always alert for the busi- 
ness of his commonwealth, and ascends to public position without 
embarrassment. Seldom is this true of England ; few school-mas- j 
ters, like Amos Kendall, or shop-clerks, like Abraham Lincoln, or * 
merchants, like Stewart, are called to the ear of the Queen. In Bel- 



438 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

fast A. T. Stewart might have grown richer than at present, but the 
Queen would never have become his guest. 

I walked down Broadway not long ago, and coming to the corner 
of where Stewart's white quadrangle of iron rises, I saw the mer- 
chant himself standing in the middle of the street, directing some 
stone-pavers. Here was the man whose income is said to have ex- 
ceeded that of the Marquis of Westminster or the Duke of Bedford. 
Every day he accumulated the yearly salary of the Secretaryship of 
the Treasury he was obliged to decline. This retail store alone is 
said to involve him in a daily expenditure of ten thousand dollars. 
Since the beginning of commerce there was probably never so great 
a merchant, neither in Tyre nor Alexandria, Venice nor London. 
And there he stood, a facile-faced, bargaining-eyed man, of light com- 
plexion, up to, or above, the good average height of slender men, 
consumed with the laying of a block of stone, and speaking about it 
to laborers and passers-by. While he stood there in plain business 
clothes, with a silk hat on his head, a pleasant spectacle to be one's 
uncle, both on account of good face and good purse, I saw a clothing- 
store man of lower Broadway pass by, who returned an income of 
above three hundred thousand dollars. Only three hundred thousand 
dollars ! The poor fellow looked at Stewart with such shrinking yet 
worshipping envy that I felt for him out of the depths of my soul. 
The possessor of certain nickels, I ran my hand in my pocket, and 
held them securely for fear this desperately poor man with only three 
hundred thousand a year would rush upon me and rob me. From 
this depth of sympathy I was again recalled to the study of Mr. 
Stewart and his three millions of dollars, — as much money laid by as 
the whole United States could save out of its vast revenue every 
month. A splendid instance of self-denial he seemed to me, to have 
the purchase-money of so much pleasure or glory, and still to be a 
plodding business man ; to be childless, and yet so devoted to the 
accumulation of fortune. I stepped into his store, and all its vast 
lower surface moved and glistened with color and invitation. Feel- 
ing like one who was entering some grand court of sovereigns, I 
passed by altars of gift-offering to the open area at the middle of the 
store, where, looking up through six floors of costly goods, through 
ships, villas, villages of upholstery, through armies of shirt-muslin 
and miles of silk stockings, and every floor moving, rustling, chat- 
tering, bargaining, I began to realize, like General Grant, that the 
mind which could direct all this, like the instinct which propelled the 



THE PEOPLE AS AFFECTED BY THE GOVERNMENTS. 439 

million-legged spider, might be able to get to the heart of the govern- 
ment finances, and distribute us back to specie payment. Down the 
store directly the owner walked, as plain as the plainest customer 
who wanted a yard of musquito netting ; and almost incredulously I 
saw him stop to speak with an Irish woman who was underrating the 
cost of a yard of ribbon. 

Owing to the more natural and practical basis of parties in Amer- 
ica, party spirit seldom becomes unsocial ; while in England parties 
growing out of social and family life often become completely 
estranged, and on trivial questions exhibit the malevolence of per- 
sonal enemies. Old age and riches, seldom separated, are the re- 
quirements of distinction amidst these institutions of primogeniture. J 
Youth is intimidated, and fresh and earnest individuality looked upon 
with suspicion. Sidney Smith, bearing testimony upon this point, 
alleges that it is always considered as a piece of impertinence in 
England, if a man of less than two or three thousand a year has any 
opinions at all upon important subjects ; and in addition he is sure 
to be assailed with all the Billingsgate of the French Revolution. 
Jacobin, Leveller, Atheist, Deist, Socinian, Incendiary, Regicide, 
were lately the gentlest appellations used ; and the man who breathed 
a syllable against the senseless bigotry of the Georges, or hinted at 
the abominable tyranny and persecution exercised upon Catholic 
Ireland, was shunned as unfit for the relations of social life. 

The prevalence of crime in England is in great part the result of 
the aristocratic government, and so is much of the prevalent atheism 
there the fruit of an Established Church, with a proud hierarchy, and 
an inquisitive eye upon the price of rectorships. Throughout the 
cities of England there are clubs of socialists and infidels, some of 
which have sent itinerant missionaries to the United States to debauch 
the moral sentiment here. One of these blasphemous fellows was a 
certain Joseph Barker, who began public life in one of the working- 
men's sceptical associations, turned dissenting preacher, again turned 
atheist, and made the tour of the United States, discussing the validi- 
ty of the Scriptures with whatever clergymen cared to enter his 
arena. He returned to England just prior to the civil war, and at- 
tempted to obtain ordination in the Established Church, but this was 
refused until he made several defences of slavery, and attacks on the 
American character, when it was understood that the authorities re- 
lented, and ordained him. These associations of sceptics are multi- 
fold, in London, and the poor are mainly their supporters. The 



440 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

indignation of the English Republicans against their political aris- 
tocracy is always apt, in fervent minds, to extend to their ecclesias- 
tical aristocracy ; for the British Bishops are greater enemies of free 
institutions than the British Nobles, if possible. Hence Thomas 
Paine, an Englishman, and an ardent friend of freedom, was driven 
by the despotism of peers temporal and peers spiritual to embrace 
both their systems in his vigorous denunciations. His bones, which 
had lain in America, were exhumed by William Cobbett, another 
English radical, and carried home triumphantly to excite the popular 
favor. Cobbett arrived at Liverpool, from America. As he pur- 
posed making a public entry into Manchester, with Paine's bones, 
great political disturbance was anticipated, and the borough-reeves 
of Manchester and Salford wrote to him, so that he altered his in- 
tended route. 

The policy of the English aristocracy, in foreign affairs, during the 
past ninety years, is condemned by all recent writers, at home as well 
as abroad. To save their class privileges they embarked in the wars 
against France, which prodigiously increased their colonies and com- 
merce ; but the former class of acquisitions has already proved bur- 
densome. The efforts of England were impotent to suppress France ; 
and having sealed Napoleon in the rock of St. Helena, she was most 
forward to recognize his nephew, and second him in another foolish 
war, whereby the march of Christianity to the Bosphorus was post- 
poned. Had England been a popular government when the French 
Revolution began, she would have been the friend of France, and 
assisted the latter to liberalize the world. Out of the struggles of 
Pitt and the aristocrats to subdue Democracy, came the English debt 
which vastly increases the burdens of the poor ; and her long struggle 
demoralized the people, so that Miss Martineau ascribes the inaugu- 
ration of the crimes of the century to her disbanded troops. . Com- 
pare the orderly conduct of the volunteer soldiers of the South and 
North, after our civil war, with the behavior of the enforced levies of 
England when Napoleon had been subdued : — 

" Such scenes of violence went forward, in different parts of the 
country, that many began to be of Romilly's opinion, that the En- 
glish character had undergone some unaccountable and portentous 
change. 

" Portentous these horrors were, but not unaccountable. Many 
soldiers had become weary of the war, which to them had been thus 



THE PEOPLE AS AFFECTED BY THE GOVERNMENTS. 441 

far all hardships and no glory. They deserted ; they could not show 
themselves at home, the penalty for desertion being death. 

" They gathered together in gangs, took possession of some for- 
saken house among the hills, or of caves on the sea-shore, and went 
forth at night, in masks and grotesque clothing, and helped them- 
selves with money and clothes wherever they could find them, sacri- 
ficing life where it was necessary to their objects." 

This demoralization, like aristocracy itself, seems to have become 
hereditary in a land of caste ; and British crime, partaking of the 
spirit of material improvements, has become formidable by science. 
The account of " London Labor and the London Poor," by the May- 
hew brothers, shows that thieves are born into an aristocracy of their 
own, reared from the cradle by their fathers, and, in the process of 
British colonization, distributed round the globe to make property 
everywhere their prey. Paris knows the Chevalier d' Industrie 
Anglais, as thoroughly as we know the British burglar. In 1869 a 
bank was robbed in New York, by English thieves, and the news- 
papers were replete with descriptions of their exquisite imple- 
ments, and the coolness of their preparations. Their tools were fine 
as the best products of Sheffield ; they were of all kinds, heavy, light, 
coarse, fine, — about four hundred pieces in all, — designed and fitted 
for every professional exigency, with the nice discrimination of a 
dentist's set of instruments. Most of the articles were specially 
made for the business, it would seem, by skilled manufacturers, in 
this country or abroad. The "jimmies" for prying open doors were 
of the finest steel, beautifully finished, each of two pieces, which 
screwed together. There were fine steel bars, one and one-half inch- 
es thick, and four feet eight inches long, chiselled-edged at each end, 
and unscrewing in the middle. All the implements, including the 
powerful jack-screw, were constructed to be taken apart, in small 
pieces, or packed into a close space, or carried about in pockets. 

Nothing could have been more nicely contrived than the can with 
a flexible tube, for filling safe locks with fine powder. The sledges 
of soft composition metal, which gave out no ringing sound, the two 
hundred brad awls, for fastening muslin against the windows, the 
gum over-shoes, in which the robbers could move about noiselessly, 
the thoughtful provision of strong cords, and of handcuffs, to gag 
and fetter anybody who should intrude on them unawares, were art- 
ful and scientific. The master stroke of the whole was the opening 
of the crack combination lock on the outer door. There were sever- 
56 



442 THE NEW WOULD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

al theories proposed, to account for this ; but they are all based on 
the supposition that by collusion, or in some other way, the burglars 
obtained the numbers of the combination to which the door was 
locked on Saturday night. " But what if they had hit upon some 
device to ascertain the combination, by manipulating the lock itself, 
making it tell its own secret, and then opened the door as easily as 
the man who had locked it? This is a flight of art, which the combi- 
nation lock-makers had believed to be beyond the reach of mortals." 

Other than these evils are directly or partly due to the nature of a 
government which makes the condition of life the accident of birth, 
hedges round the few with laws and ceremonies, and treats the bulk 
of its fellow-men as unworthy of its franchises. Better than this 
great oligarchy is a throne where there is but one family ascendant 
in a whole realm, and not a social and landed viceroy in every parish ; 
and it is remarkable that at this time the monarch of England is pop- 
ular with English radicals, while the aristocracy is the object of their 
attacks. A woman, and a good one, the Queen is removed from the 
conflicts of politicians, and is the magistrate, though secretly under 
their management. To her reach the sympathies of the people , though 
they are as jealously kept from access to her as the Japanese from 
their heavenly Emperor. A chain of aristocrats guard her person, 
arrogating to themselves the priestship of the temple, and often in 
the doors thereof playing lewdness and robbery, like the sons of Eli. 
Perhaps when the aristocracy is gone, the High Priest also may reel 
in his chair ; for many believe that the present English sovereign is 
the next to the last. 

Still, the English people are loyal to their sovereign ; whatever she 
may be, they believe that she is all to them. 

u Though we call ourselves loyal to our country and institutions," 
says Hawthorne, " and prove it by our readiness to shed blood, and 
sacrifice life in their behalf, still the principle is as cold and hard in 
an American bosom, as the steel spring that puts in motion a power- 
ful machinery. In the Englishman's s} 7 stem a force similar to that 
of our steel spring is generated by the warm throbbings of human 
hearts. He clothes our bare abstraction in flesh and blood, — at 
present in the flesh and blood of a woman, — and manages to com- 
bine love, awe, and intellectual reverence, all in one emotion, and to 
embody his mother, his wife, his children, the whole idea of kindred, 
in a single person, and make her the representative of his country and 
its laws." 



THE PEOPLE AS AFFECTED BY THE GOVERNMENTS. 443 

Whether this be superstition or tradition, it is pleasing and curious 
to us, but incompatible and undesirable in a land where the people, 
and not the ruler, is the source of power. The Hindoo is as loyal 
to his idol, but there is nothing in it, except that which he himself 
implants. 

But while lo}^alty abounds, charity fails ; for with all the wealth of 
England, — the richest country, in capital, on the globe, — there are 
more poor, indolent, or wicked people in the United Kingdom than 
in an\ r Christian nation. Can that be a well-governed country which 
is at once the richest and contains the most paupers ? The kingdom 
is cramped, but not so densely that this condition of things can be 
accounted for : — 

There must now be 75,000 beggars in London alone, collecting, in 
the aggregate, several millions sterling a year. The paupers, on an 
area of 78,000 acres, number 145,000, and cost £1,300,000 a year. 
But many who get out-door parish relief also beg from societies and 
individuals. The real cost of the London poor, the money expended 
unearned, in various ways, may count up to £10,000,000. For the 
past five years there has been a steady increase. Vagabondism and 
ruffianism have also made steady progress, not only in London, but in 
the provinces. The Recorder of Manchester charged the Grand Jury, in 
1869, that " in sobriety and general obedience to the law, Lancashire 
was going backward." A London paper, of May, in the same 3'ear, 
said, " If any one wants to see ruffianism in its most revolting state, 
let him take a journey to St. James Palace, at eleven o'clock, when 
the band plays. Here he will find an army of low-looking thieves 
and vagabonds, — hale, strong-looking men and hearty youths, — who 
follow up the band, shouting and cursing, and bonneting one another. 
In no other capital of Europe would such things be permitted. The 
band over, these fellows lie about St. James Park, on the grass, and 
on the benches, and round about the ornamental water." 

This is a picture : St. James Palace, music, and court, and in the 
gardens thereof this army of paupers ! 

A member of Parliament, at about the same time, produced statis- 
tics to show how pauperism had increased during the last twenty-five 
years. In 1844, the number of confirmed paupers was 800,000, and 
they cost £4,976,000 ; in 1854, the number was 864,000, and the ex- 
penditure was £5,232,000 ; in 1864, the paupers had risen to 1,014,- 
000, and the expenditure to £6,423,000 ; and in 1867, there were 
1,040,000 paupers, and their cost was £6,939,000. 



HI THE NEW WOBLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

That nation may be strong, but not that people, where such things 
are intermingled : the shining horses, the liveries, and the benignant 
peers, gliding through aisles of abandoned poor ; the richest men in 
Europe, cheered or hated by the worst, and all fellow-countrymen! 
It is these latter who do the fighting of England, the bleeding, and 
the suffering, w T hile those — a handful — direct the empire, and hold 
it in their power to crush states and risings for freedom. 

Let us take two examples of the " wise few," who are reared to 
statesmanship, and both of them eminent, and compare them with a 
pair of men who should have belonged to the opposite class. The 
first is Francis Bacon, whom Dr. Samuel Tyler, an American jurist, 
has thus depicted : — 

" At this juncture in the progress of thought (1620), the most 
majestic and prophetic mind known to the history of philosophy rose 
up to lead men in the new career of investigation which had been 
begun. Trained in the practice of a jurisprudence the most techni- 
cal, and in its routine the most servile, and the most obedient to au- 
thority and traditional usage of any which has been established 
amongst men, we see the remarkable spectacle of a Lord Chancellor 
of England laying aside for the moment the King's seals, to become 
the keeper of the seals of nature. And, in a majesty of diction un- 
paralleled in the history of philosophy, this great thinker proclaimed 
to the world a new method of philosophy to guide the mighty spirit 
of inquiry which was abroad over the field of observation. Philoso- 
phy, no longer confined to the schools, is led forth by a politician 
and lawyer, out from the confines of authority, into the amplitudes. 
From this moment the freedom of the human mind was established. 
This man of business, this accomplished courtier, this cunning law- 
yer, this consummate orator, this leader in the affairs of the world, 
appears on the stage of philosophical thought, wifh a more compre- 
hensive grasp of thinking, and a greater forecast than any one of 
even the many trained, especially to philosophy, who had preceded 
him." 

Yet this courtier and noble, whose powers of mind have never 
been eclipsed, proved to be one of the most venal and corrupt politi- 
cians in history. He was convicted of base ingratitude, of tortures 
and thefts, and he belongs to that great array of men, educated for 
statesmanship, who were not fit to rule, because they considered only 
themselves and their class. 

One other sketch of the " wise few" is afforded by Mr. Kinglake, 



THE PEOPLE AS AFFECTED BY THE GOVERNMENTS. 4AB 

in his summary of Gladstone, — a partisan sketch, but suggestive, as 
showing how the mere study of politics makes the strongest and 
purest mind qualmish and diplomatic, and cautious almost to super- 
stition : — 

" He was famous for the splendor of his eloquence, for his unaffected 
pietjr, and for his blameless life ; he was celebrated, far and wide, 
for a more than common liveliness of conscience. He had once im- 
agined it to be his duty to quit a government, and to burst through 
strong ties of friendship and gratitude, by reason of a thin shade 
of difference on the subject of white or brown sugar. It was believed 
that if he were to commit even a little sin, or to imagine an evil 
thought, he would instantly arraign himself before the dread tribunal 
which att aited him in his own bosom ; and that, his intellect being 
subtle and microscopic, and delighting in casuistry and exaggera- 
tion, he would be likely to give his soul a very harsh trial, and treat 
himself as a great criminal, for faults too minute to be visible to the 
naked eyes of laymen. His friends lived in dread of his virtues, as 
tending to make him whimsical and unstable, and the practical poli- 
ticians, conceiving that he was not to be depended upon for party 
purposes, and was bent upon none but lofty objects, used to look 
upon him as dangerous." 

To these two natures, the one powerful and corrupt, the other 
learned and conscientious, and both qualified at great expense ex- 
pressly to guide a state, oppose two other Englishmen who were 
sprung from lowly walks, — the one a farmer's son, the other the child 
of a cotton-spinner, and both of them learned how to rule a state b} r 
contact with labor, rather than by the mastery of diplomacy : — 

" Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright," says Kinglake, " were members of 
the House of Commons. Both had the gift of a manly, strenuous, 
eloquence, and their diction being founded upon English lore, rather 
than upon shreds of weak Latin, went straight to the mind of their 
hearers. Of these men, the one could persuade, the other could 
attack ; and, indeed, Mr. Bright' s oratory was singularly well qualified 
for preventing an erroneous acquiescence in the policy of the clay ; for, 
besides that he was honest, and fearless, — besides that, with a ring- 
ing voice, he had all the clearness and force which resulted from his 
great natural gifts, as well as from his one-sicled method of thinking, 
— he had the advantage of being generally able to speak in a state 
of sincere anger. In former years, whilst their minds were disci- 
plined by the almost mathematical exactness of the reasonings on 



44:6 THE NEW WOULD COMPAEED WITH THE OLD. 

which they relied, and when they were acting in concert with the 
shrewd traders of the North, who had a very plain object in view, 
these two orators had shown with what a strength, with wimt a mas- 
terly skill, with what patience, with what a high courage, they 
could carry a great scientific truth through the storms of politics ; 
they had shown that they could arouse and govern the assenting thou- 
sands who listened to them with delight ; that they could bend the 
House of Commons ; that they could press their creed upon a prime 
minister, and put upon his mind so hard a stress, that, after a while, 
he felt it to be a torture, and a violence to his reason, to have to make 
a stand against them. 

" Nay, more ! each of these two gifted men had proved that he 
could go bravely into the midst of angry opponents, could show 
them their fallacies, one by one, destroy their favorite theories 
before their very faces, and triumphantly argue them down. These 
two men were honestly devoted to the cause of peace. There was no 
stain upon their names." 

It was Richard Cobden, self-made, to whom Sir Robert Peel gave 
credit for the act which has made Peel's name eminent ; and what- 
ever Gladstone has accomplished has been in the path indicated and 
smoothed by Bright and Cobden thirty years ago. 

We have had two men in America who were reared in the school 
of the wise few : John Quincy Adams and William H. Seward. Both 
were students in statesmanship, travellers in foreign lands, men of 
ample fortunes, and of the best social rank that we have. Mr. Adams 
was particularly of spotless character, and learned in all branches, 
economical or elegant. His education did not change his popular 
sympathies ; for he was illustrious in the dignity of his life and his 
earnestness for freedom ; but it did not enable him to conduct a more 
brilliant administration than Presidents of less acquirement, who bet- 
ter knew the needs and temper of the people. 

Mr. Seward is the most admired in England of all our public men. 
He was an European politician, of all the boldness and finesse of 
Palmerston, and his opportunities were abundant as his promotion 
was long here. He rendered valuable services, and obtained the 
gratitude of his countrymen ; but in those features of his policy 
wherein he followed English precedents he lost confidence, and the 
nation did not endorse him. He engaged in subtle treaties without 
the knowledge of Congress, and attempted to make grand strategy 
of politics, whereby, after the English fashion, a party leader might 



THE PEOPLE AS AFFECTED BY THE GOVERNMENTS. 447 

change sentiment when he pleased, and compose principles according 
to the condition of his liver. 

It cannot be affirmed that we are ruled by the " wise few," in 
America ; for the public sensitiveness is delicate and arbitrary here, 
and we are frequently too uncharitable toward our public servants. 
Indeed, we find that the wisest few who do rule us are often below 
the average morals and intellect of the mighty mass. De Tocqueville 
remarked this : — 

" On my arrival in the United States, I was surprised to find so 
much distinguished talent among the subjects, and so little among 
the heads of the government. It is a well-authenticated fact, that at 
the present day the most able men in the United States are very rarely 
placed at the head of affairs ; and it must be acknowledged that such 
has been the result in proportion as democracy has outstepped all its 
former limits. The race of American statesmen has evidently dwin- 
dled most remarkably in the course of the last fifty years." 

At the same time, the race of American citizens has undoubtedly 
advanced ; rulers and ruled were long approaching each other, and 
the level has been nearly reached. 

" The mass of the citizens," says the same authority, " are sin- 
cerely disposed to promote the welfare of their country ; nay, more, 
it may even be allowed that the lower classes are less apt to be swayed 
by considerations of personal interest than the higher orders ; but it 
is always more or less impossible for them to discern the best means 
of attaining the end which they desire with sincerity." 

The cure for this must be in the more thorough education of the 
people in subjects of government, in our schools, and in the civil ser- 
vice ; and the latter can only be accomplished by a grand awakening 
of public sentiment to meet and overthrow the managers of politics. 
Hitherto it has been true that " the people have neither the time not 
the means which are essential to the prosecution of an investigation 
of this kind ; their conclusions are hastily formed from a superficial 
inspection of the more prominent features of a question. Hence they 
often assent to the clamor of a mountebank who knows the secret 
of stimulating their tastes, whilst their truest friends frequently fail 
in their exertions." 

This is still true in a marked degree. The politicians have coaxed 
from the people reservation after reservation of wisdom, until our 
benches of court are the stake of political parties, and hints have 



448 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

even been made toward throwing the Supreme Court into the 
scramble. 

Chancellor Kent says, in speaking with great eulogium of that 
part of the Constitution which empowers the executive to nomi- 
nate the judges : " It is indeed probable that the men who are best 
fitted to discharge the duties of this high office would have too much 
reserve in their manners, and too much austerity in their principles, 
for them to be returned by the majority, at an election where uni- 
versal suffrage is adopted." This is not foreign but domestic author- 
ity, and it is true that we have reduced to the general ballot too many 
cloistered offices which should have been forever kept without the polit- 
ical arena. During the trial of the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, 
and afterward, certain unruly representatives, of the type of which 
De Tocqueville speaks below, amongst which was one Ingersoll of Illi- 
nois, from the whiskey-distilling district of Peoria, even insulted the 
Senate. 

u On entering the House of Representatives, of Washington, one is 
struck by the vulgar demeanor of that great assembly. The eye fre- 
quently does not discover a man of celebrity within its walls. Its 
members are almost all obscure individuals, whose names present no 
associations to the mind ; they are mostly village lawyers, men in 
trade, or even persons belonging to the lower classes of society. In 
a country in which education is very general, it is said that the rep- 
resentatives of the people do not always know how to write correctly. 

" At a few yards' distance from this spot is the door of the Senate, 
which contains within a small space a large proportion of the cele- 
brated men of America. Scarcely an individual is to be perceived in 
it who does not recall reminiscences of an active and illustrious career. 
The Senate is composed of eloquent advocates, distinguished gen- 
erals, wise magistrates, and statesmen of note, whose language would 
at all times do honor to the most remarkable parliamentary debates 
in Europe. 

" What, then, is the cause of this strange contrast, and why are 
the most able citizens to be found in one assembly, rather than in 
the other? Why is the former body remarkable for its vulgarity and 
its poverty of talent, whilst the latter seems to enjoy a monopoly of 
intelligence and of sound judgment? Both of these assemblies ema- 
nate from the people ; both of them are chosen by universal suffrage ; 
and no voice has hitherto been heard to assert, in America, that the 
Senate is hostile to the interests of the people. From what cause, 



THE PEOPLE AS AFFECTED BY THE GOVERNMENTS. 449 

then, docs so startling a difference arise? The only reason which 
appears to me adequately to account for it is, that the House of Rep- 
resentatives is elected by the populace directly, and that the Senate 
is elected by elected bodies." 

Since De Tocqueville's time the politicians have assumed to ma- 
nipulate even the Senate, and some of them have cried for its extirpa- 
tion. Only a grand rising of the people from their homes can rout 
these traders in office, few of whom command the respect of the homes 
of the land, but are elected b} r default of honest votes. 

" In the United States the persons who engage in the perplexities 
of political life are individuals of very moderate pretensions. The 
pursuit of wealth generally diverts men of great talents and of great 
passions from the pursuit of power ; and it very frequently happens that 
a man does not undertake to direct the fortune of the state until he has 
discovered his incompetence to conduct his own affairs! /" 

If this were true forty years ago, when written, how much truer 
to-day ! Recent travellers have noticed the same fact, that, with a 
government that is of the best nature, the citizens fail to perform 
their duties at the polls, and bequeath to the basest dregs of society 
the sacred offering of the ballot. The government, in its nature, is not 
responsible for this neglect ; for it was considered, at its foundation, 
that the slight and infrequent duty of supporting it with his choice 
would be gladly undertaken by every man who had an interest or a 
pride in his nationality. We have been prospering in our private 
business, and the state has hitherto been of little importance to any 
of us pecuniarily ; but the state is now growing greater than the na- 
tion, and the cry to every holder of the ballot must go up : — 

"Help us, or we perish!" 

Mr. Trollope, in 1862, noticed the carelessness of our people in this 
respect, and ascribed it mistakenly to a dislike for our form of govern- 
ment. " In all governmental matters," he says, " the people of the 
nation have been strangely undemonstrative. They have assented to 
a system which has been used for transferring the political power of 
the nation to a body of trading politicians, who have become known 
and felt as a mass, and not known and felt as individuals. I find it 
difficult to describe the present political position of the States in this 
respect. 

" The millions of the people are eager for the Constitution, are proud 
57 



450 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

of their power as a nation, and are ambitious of national greatness. 
But they are not, as I think, especially desirous of retaining political 
influence in their own hands. At many of the elections it is difficult 
to induce them to vote. They have among them a half-knowledge 
that politics is a trade in the hands of the lawyers, and that they are 
the capital by which those political tradesmen carry on their busi- 
ness. These politicians are all lawyers. Politics and law go to- 
gether as naturally as the possession of land and the exercise of 
magisterial powers do with us." 

Seven 3'ears afterwnrd, Mr. Sprague, Senator from Rhode Island, 
discovered the same fact of the lawyers. 

Many of our social errors in America are not ascribable in any 
respect to our government, while they afford pretext for attacks upon 
it. We have been so engrossed in business that we have become 
unsocial in all public places. Russell, of the " Times, " remarked in 
Montreal that the Americans usually came into the salon singl} r ; 
each man, with a bundle of newspapers under his arm, took a seat at 
a vacant table, ordered a prodigious repast, which he gobbled in 
haste, as though he was afraid of losing a train, and then rushed off 
to the bar or smoked in the passages, never sitting for a moment 
after his breakfast. The Englishmen came in little knots or groups, 
exhibited no great anxiety about newspapers, ordered simple and 
substantial feasts, enjoyed them at their ease, chattered much, and 
were in no particular hurry to leave the table. " The taciturnity of 
the American was not well-bred, nor was the good humor of the 
Briton vulgar. " 

Our national manners will compare favorably with those of most 
nations, and are far more courtly than those of the average English- 
man. Woman is respected here ; there is frank equality accorded and 
demanded between men ; but it is natural that in a new, rough coun- 
try, rough people should sometimes get into the marts and capifols. 
Asa general rule our present politicians are among our worst-bred 
men, their associations being the worst. More men eat with their 
knives in Washington than in any city in America. That I may not 
be accused of speaking severely of the English lower classes only, I 
will give this instance of the worst-mannered man I ever saw in any 
country : — 

I was writing and making notes in the library of Congress, while 
Compiling this book, and while most busily engaged a shadow from 
behind fell upon my table. Thinking it some friend who was privi- 



THE PEOPLE AS AFFECTED BY THE GOVERNMENTS. 451 

leged to take the liberty, I did not look up for some seconds or min- 
utes. The hand from behind picked up a piece of my manuscript, 
read it over, took up a second, and so forth, until finally I turned 
round, irritated. 

There stood a total stranger, — a large, politician-like, coarse- 
grained, impudent-eyed man, — coolly reading my manuscript. It was 
so outrageous a violation of decency and so rascalty a liberty, that I 
felt the blood go up my face like the hoisting of the British standard. 

" Is that your conception of manners, sir?" I said to the man. 

He looked at me like a stone with a smile on it, for a few minutes, 
and then said, with a contemptuous voice : — 

" My God ! I reckon everything here is public property, aint it? 
I reckon 'taint no use to put on airs here, be it? I guess not ! " 

Not deigning me another word, this republican genius went round 
all the circuit of the tables, peering in the notes and pages of every 
reader, lady or man, and at the end, giving me a half-defiant yet im- 
passive look, went out at a floundering stride. 

Two days afterward I saw this man, walking between two Represen- 
tatives, go into the White House. He was pointed out to me as a 
man who had captured a valuable revenue office. 

Now, consider this type of man a representative unit of the two or 
three thousand visitors at the White House daily. If he sees a door 
marked : — 

" Public not admitted here," 

that is the particular door which he means to go through. If he 
cannot go through it he will peep through it. He means to " make 
a row" about it. His impudent stare and the coarse " feel " of 
his hand is upon every face or object he sees. The onty sort of 
grace he possesses is an adjunct to cunning, when, on occasion, he 
can wheedle, or flatter, and put his soul through degrading gymnas- 
tics, creep on his belly, kneel and crawl like a snake, — anything but 
hear a " No " said without insolence or malignity. 

Such is England as affected by her government, such America. 
We shall have grave questions to meet, which will try the virtue of 
our institutions ; we are opening wide the gates of suffrage, hereto- 
fore ajar, and inviting hoary heathenism to become units with us in 
self-government. But we cannot have issues in the future more dis- 
maying than England in the present, — all sympathy for her ! — thus 
summed up by one of her best missionaries of peace : — 



4:52 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

" For the United States there is no Catholic question, no Irish 
Church or Scotch Church question ; no difficulties between Church and 
State, or Church and Dissenters, or about national education, on ac- 
count of religious differences and claims. For the United States 
there is no such question of Representative Reform as convulsed 
Great Britain thirty-five years ago, because the republic has not yet 
outgrown any of its principles of representation, as England had. 
For the United States there is no peril of exhaustion and decay by 
an inappropriate and corrupted poor-law, such as that which was 
truly called the gangrene in the social life of England, which it was 
equally dangerous to remove and to let alone. The success with 
which the reform was at length accomplished may interest American 
readers ; but it is to be hoped that there will never be reason for any 
closer sympathy. In the same way the United States have no 
colonial troubles to manage, no conquered countries — territories con- 
quered centuries before the present generation saw the light — to 
elevate, to attach, and to make free and happy ; and the best friends 
of the republic will ever pray that no generation of the citizens will 
in any age bequeath such an inheritance of difficulty and pain to its 
posterity. The United States have no such mass of heterogeneous 
and unsystematized law as England still has to digest, consolidate, 
and arrange ; nor such anomalies of jurisdiction and administration 
to reconcile or abolish. The United States have no such relics of 
feudal times as the game laws ; no such associations in our irritable, 
unhappy, and perverse portion of the country as Orange Societies, 
and Ribbon Societies, and Whiteboys in Ireland. ,, 



CHAPTER XVn. 

AMERICA AND ENGLAND AS INFLUENCED BY EACH OTHER. 

The critics of each country upon the other. — Causes of our mutual estrangement and con- 
sequences of it. — American ideas in England and British emigrants in America. — The 
peacemakers. 

With the preceding hasty survey of England, as a subject of curi- 
osity to us, we may conclude by a few inquiries as to which nation 
owes most to the other. And here is the present quality of exchange : 
our money is exported to England as to the richer country in accumu- 
lations, and British people are exported to us as to the richer country 
in prospective riches, and the better in present opportunity. England 
affects us as a powerful state, w T here the people are organized most 
efficiently for war and melted into its thunderbolts. The figure that 
struck Webster was of British drums following the course of the sun 
around the earth ; the* picture that Byron saw of America was : — 

" One great clime, 
Whose vigorous offspring by dividing ocean 
Are kept apart, and nursed in the devotion 
Of freedom." 

These are the distinctions : when we are menaced by war, civil or 
foreign, by debt, by any of those things which test the fabric of the 
state, we recall the prescriptions of England, — her energies drilled, 
her people bred to the sea and to harness, like so many blooded 
animals, her powers for despotism or for peace alike kept under the 
watchful lash or goad of the monarchy ; when England is at peace, — 
and peace is the wish of all the better nations now, — she looks at 
her festering masses, ignorant, striving in vain for release from vice, 
and from hard labor underpaid, for a better life and a better chance, 
and she has but to follow their trail to muse upon the nation that is 
the consuming problem of her existence. 

It has been often said that we, of all nations, should have been 
allies, — parcels of each other, with a common antiquity, and a like 

453 



454: THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

religion, literature, and common law. But there is no great nation 
that can be the friend of England, as there has never been any such 
which could abide her arrogant and jealous temper. She has impulses 
of good, and sympathies for the weak, but no conception of the 
friendship of equals, no magnanimity to see the standard-bearer of 
her language widen its destinies and accommodate itself to its mis- 
sion. 

Before we took up arms, she seemed to apprehend the future that 
might open to us, and exerted all the violence of her prerogatives to 
depress us. When we revolted, she used her energies almost to ex- 
haustion to conquer us, and when from time to time she was repulsed, 
she only lessened in her offers of peace the number of patriots she 
intended to hang. 

For that period, and the period succeeding, the present generation 
of Englishmen is not accountable ; only a few live who remember 
her bullying and her outrages upon the high seas, her orders in Coun- 
cil, the burning of our Capitol, the wasting of our coasts. 

Failing in both attempts, she opened upon us by such unity and 
concert the more offensive batteries of the most servile press in 
Europe, that we have a national indictment against England which is 
for the present, at least, committed to every American memory. It 
is not an indictment which can come to trial ; flfut it cannot come to be 
explained away. 'There is no error in the assurance of it, however it 
may be drawn. And that it was not the mere verbiage of irresponsi- 
ble people came to proof in the latest and last crisis of our nation, 
when England put her fleets and stores of arms to sea with less inten- 
tion to assist our malcontents than to crush the principle that both 
of us represented. We are not to be persuaded in a day nor a year 
that it is possible for us to be the natural allies of a state guilty of 
this long vindictiveness. The London " Times" assumed it, when in 
answer to the speech of Hon. Charles Sumner on England's respon- 
sibility for the ravages of the Alabama, that paper said, " We cannot 
be made to pay for our sentiments." The long abuse of us and the 
last assault upon us are directly charged by the American people to the 
living generation of England, and to our grievance is added suspicion 
of the hasty and servile congratulations which are now tendered us. 

There is no foreign subject on which the representative intelligence 
of America is more informed than this. We know every man who 
said good words for us at the right time ; we know the friendship of 
the English workingmen, — the only nobility that we recognize as of 



AMERICA AND ENGLAND. 455 

any consequence to us ; and we know, as even meaner than the pseudo 
nobility, the miserable class of British tradesmen who are unworthy 
of any class, as they are of none, parasites of aristocracy, whether 
they write leaders in Furnival's Inn, or write law in Gray's Inn Lane, 
or write books by Blackheath, or write invoices from Blackwall. Mr. 
Dickens, on his second and financial errand to America, thought that 
a comet had better fire the earth than America and England go to 
war ; but of the fourteen millions of people added to America since 
his first visit, not one could have taken encouragement to come 
amongst us for anything that Mr. Dickens had written. 

It was as if England had planted buoys along all our coasts and 
placarded them with: "Keep off!" "Man-eaters dwell here!" 
" Beware of the Mob ! " % " Violence ashore ! " And suddenly by an 
illumination of victory over a purified republic and a rescued state, we 
had read from the same missionary beacons : "Happy Land !" "Ever- 
lasting Alliance ! " " Same Shakespeare ! " " Give us }^our hand ! " 

A state debauched in honesty like this must either have a heartless 
national character or a treacherous government, — and it can take its 
choice ! 

The true index to British dislike of us was doubtless inspired by 
the suspicious malevolence of an aristocracy for a republic. The 
literary war upon us began with old Doctor Johnson, pensioned by 
Lord Bute, who attacked us during our Revolution, and George III. 
gave the true index to the fear of the aristocracy, when, on receiving 
our first ministers, he muttered " in deep emotion " his conviction that 
the monarchical was the only proper form of government. 

Since that time we have been, not the victims, but the objects, of 
constant scurrility and concerted evil prophesying. Our own be- 
havior in return has been hospitable, conciliatory, at times mildly 
reproachful. 

All attempts made to endow scholarships of American history and 
literature at Oxford and Cambridge Universities have been rejected, 
and' upon what other ground it would be hard to say, than that of 
repugnance to permit America to be understood, at her best, by young 
Englishmen. Yet this British nation, so meanly illiberal in its senti- 
ment, is forever lecturing us upon the beauty of reciprocity ; it seems 
that trade ought to be free current, but not history and morals. On 
the other hand there are many thousand Americans who look upon 
English political history, since the close of the French and Indian war, 
as well-nigh a useless study in our colleges, and one that had better 



4:56 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

be displaced by the study of European continental politics. The 
economic history of England began at the suppression of Bonaparte, 
and is of vast interest, while all its triumphs have been the rebuke 
of the previous century of English glory. The name of Pitt is 
pigmy beside that of Peel ; Wellington's hollow squares disappear in 
Watt's hollow cylinders ; the live men of England are civilized from 
America, and every great advance movement in England, for eighty 
years, has been in despite of the literature which has wasted so 
much advice on America. The tune of the creature has changed of 
late, but not his appetite, and it is unlikely that America will pay as 
much heed to English adulation in the future as she gave to English 
jealousy in the past. The " Times," which is of late our sweet- 
heart, said of us no longer ago than 186^, in its praise of Russell's 
diary : — 

u The United States have been a vast burlesque on the functions 
of national existence, and it was Mr. Russell's fate to behold their 
transformation scene, and to see the first tumbles of their clowns and 
pantaloons. It was time for him to come away, though the shame of 
his retirement was theirs. He did his duty while he was with them, 
and he has left them a legacy in this 4 Diary.' " 

Gather together all the literature of bigotry since the Reformation, 
and there will not be any parcel so filthy as fifty } r ears of British 
comment on America, which served, like garbage in general, only to 
fertilize the land on which it was shed. As the blood of the mart} T rs 
was the seed of the church, the ink of British critics was the seed of 
America. And this being discovered, the British sweetheart asks us 
now to be thankful for it. At which characteristic impertinence we 
shall be probably magnanimous enough to smile. A thorough brief 
upon this subject is the work of Henry T. Tuckerman, entitled 
" America and her Commentators," which, it is to be regretted, closes 
before the period of that climatic vituperation during the war, when 
almost every chip-monk and bull-frog between John O'Groat's and 
Land's End swelled the riot of denunciation. It was a chorus" like 
that the devils raised in Longfellow's " Golden Legend " around the 
cross they are striving to hurl from the cathedral : — 

John Bull, " Hasten ! hasten ! 

Oh ye spirits ! 

From its station drag the ponderous 
Cross of iron that to mock us 
Is uplifted high in air ! 



AMERICA AND ENGLAND. 457 

Aristocratic voices. " Oh, we cannot ! 

For around it 

All the Saints and Guardian Angels 
Throng in legions to protect it; 
They defeat us everywhere ! " 

So rallied the desperate minions of aristocracy around the Ameri- 
can flag, and, failing to rend it, Mr. Russell, their ablest and most un- 
principled emissary, lugubriously added : — 

" I never could meet any one in the States able to account for the 
insignia on that flag, though it has been suggested that they are an 
amplification of the heraldic bearing of George Washington. Strange, 
indeed, if the family blazon -of an English squire should have become 
the flaunting flag of the Great Republic, which, with all its faults, has 
done so much for the world, and may yet, purged of its vanity, ar- 
rogance, and aggressive tendency, do so much more for mankind ! 
Not excepting our own, it is the most widely spread flag on the seas ; 
for whilst it floats by the side of the British ensign in every haunt of 
our commerce, it has almost undisputed possession of vast tracts of 
sea in the Pacific and South Atlantic." 

No clearer indication can be had of the self-conviction of England 
as to her treatment of America than her universal speed at the close 
of our war to borrow our military inventions and extend her navy ; 
the great inquiry of the English press became : — 

" How many troops can the Yankees put in the field? How many 
ships on the sea ? " 

Then came the almost enforced confederation of the Canadas and 
neighboring colonies ; and to this day the fear of suffering some 
physical return for her brutal treatment of America is apparent 
throughout the wide range of English periodicals. In ludicrous 
avarice, even greater than this fear, the Southern bondholders in 
England meet to ask the Federal Government to pay the notes of 
hand cashed by them for the price of our assassination. Impudent 
servility on the one hand, alarmed spite on the other, — these are the 
leading traits of the English nation as instanced in intercourse with 
us. None but a rare Christian man could forgive such a character, 
if he met him in social life ; and yet perhaps America can rise to this 
rank and forget this uncivil nation. 

The question is put : " Does it become us as a great state to be 
sensitive to abuse?" Perhaps not; yet complaint is made of us 
that we lack identity, and therefore cannot be a strong and sensitive 
58 



458 THE NEW WOULD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

state. English comment is worth just this to us : it teaches us not 
what we are, but who are the English people. What generous natures, 
open sentiments, philosophic cheerfulnesses, and cosmopolitan edu- 
cations must they have who can devote fifty years of journalism to 
our aggravation, and yet have never produced one philosophic treatise 
upon America out of the Bibliotheque they have made ppon us ! 
For two centuries previously the English berated France in the same 
way, and at the spectacle of her heroic Revolution they beggared 
themselves willingly to pluck the eagle's feathers from her wing. It 
is this state, where every strata of society is skewered through with 
the cold pulse of aristocracj^, which claims to be our only blood rela- 
tive and progenitor ; but except in a certain practicalit}' of head and 
a similar language we are no longer Englishmen here, but have been 
humanized with all the tempers of the world. Our race resembles 
more the Saxon-English of the time of Alfred than the fictitious 
Englishman of to-day. 

" The superior candor of the French writers on America is obvious 
to the most superficial reader," says Mr. Tuckerman. " The urbanity 
and the philosophical tendency of the national mind account for 
this more genial and intelligent treatment ; but the striking difference 
of temper and of scope between the French and English travels ip 
America is accounted for mainly by the comparative freedom from 
political and social prejudice on the part of the former, and the 
frequent correspondence of their sentiments with those of the in- 
habitants of the New World." 

The difference between a French and an English aristocrat is, that 
one accepts the situation, and the other compels it. A thorough 
English democrat, like Cobden, makes use of America for suggestion 
rather than for demonstration, and is hence not more disinterested, 
perhaps, but more liberal and sensible. 

Beyond the dislike of the dominant aristocracy, the English peo- 
ple have accustomed themselves, through years of cavilling and 
meddling with mankind, to become the worst observers in the world, 
and the most disagreeable travellers. This is their reputation in 
every country of Europe ; waiters and commissionaires run for them, 
but everybody else runs the other way. Their innumerable guide- 
books of other lands are illustrations of bad digestion, bad manners, 
and no philosophy ; and the majority of their commonplace books 
of travel are directed entirely toward the aristocratic market. 

The memorable papers which first established the reputation of 



AMERICA AND ENGLAND. 459 

Dickens curiously indicate the prevalence of this deprecatory and 
venal spirit in English writers on America, at a late period. The 
elder AVeller, in suggesting to Samivel his notable plan for the 
escape of Pickwick from the Fleet Prison, by concealing himself in a 
" pianner forty," significantly acids : " Have a passage ready taken 
for 'Merriker. Let the gov'ner stop there till Mrs. BardelFs dead, 
and then take and let him come back and write a book about the 
'Merrikens as '11 pay all his expenses, and more, if he blows 'em up 
enough." 

The man who could write this passage six years before he himself 
wrote just that sort of book could scarcely have been careful about 
what the world said of his literary integrity. We have had all sorts 
of tramps and eavesdroppers amongst us from the land of our natural 
ally, and they appear to have been of little account at home, by Eng- 
lish report. Ashe, one of the most noted of them, is openly de- 
scribed as a swindler ; Faux as " low ; " Parkinson was " a common 
gardener ; " Fearon " a stocking-weaver." Cobbett, who is the last 
person to be suspected of aristocratic prejudices, and was the most 
practical and perverse of democrats, observed, in reading the fastidi- 
ous comments of one of these impudent travellers upon an American 
meal, that it was " such a breakfast as the fellow had never before 
tasted ; " and the remark explains the presumption and ignorance of 
many of this class of writers, who, never before having enjoyed the 
least social consideration or private luxury, became, like a beggar on 
horseback, intoxicated therewith. 

Our ladies were particularly taken to task by Mrs. Trollope, a sort 
of peripatetic lady whose fortune was made by our sensitiveness ; and 
we have since had an expiatory sort of book from her son Anthony, 
whom I have frequently quoted in this compilation. Mr. Tuckermaii 
sums up the second Trollope thus interestingly : — 

" Mr. Trollope seems extremel} 7 afraid of giving offence, continually 
deprecates the idea, and wishes it understood that it is very painful 
to him to find fault with anybody or anything in the United States ; 
but he must censure as well as blame, and he means no unkindness. 
All this, however amiable, is really preposterous. It presupposes a 
degree of importance as belonging to his opinions, or rather a neces- 
sity for their expression, which seems to us quite irrational in a man 
of such common sense, and who has seen so much of the world. It 
is amusing, and, as a friend remarked, ' comes from his blood, not his 
brain.' It is the old leaven of self-love, self-importance, self-assertion, 



4:60 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

of the Englishman as such. If he had passed years instead of 
months in America, and grown familiar with other circles beside the 
circle of litterateurs who so won his admiration in Boston, he would 
have found all he has written of the spoiled children, the hard 
women, the despotic landlords, disgusting railway cars, western 
swindlers, bad architecture, official peculations, mud, dust, and 
desolation of Washington, misery of Cairo, and base, gold-seeking 
politicians of America, overheated rooms, incongruous cuisine, and 
undisciplined juveniles, thoroughly appreciated, perfectly understood, 
and habitually the subject of native protest and foreign report." 

Enough of these wailing travellers ; and it is scarcely necessary to 
consider the late English panegyrics upon us, which are as worthless, 
excepting, perhaps, the manly book of Charles W. Dilke, who recog- 
nizes the fact that America and England are not of the same blood : 
66 America is becoming not English merely, but world-embracing in the 
variety of its type ; and, as the English element has given language 
and history to that land, America offers the English race the moral 
directorship of the globe, by ruling mankind through Saxon institu- 
tions and the English tongue. Through America, England is speak- 
ing to the world." 

De Tocqueville ascribes our alleged sensitiveness to criticism, to 
the nature of our government. 

" Democratic institutions generally give men a lofty notion of their 
country and of themselves. An American leaves his country with a 
heart swollen with pride ; on arriving in Europe he at once finds out 
that we are not so engrossed by the United States and the great 
people which inhabits them as he had supposed, and this begins to 
annoy him." 

There are, undoubted^, Americans, who are fascinated by the 
higher social life of England, its juicy chops and steaks, its large 
estates, luxurious life, and high-born manners ; but a still larger 
number are fascinated by Paris and the Continent ; we go where we 
can get the most for our money, if pleasure be the object. Haw- 
thorne, while Consul at Liverpool, saw even more decidecl preference 
for England amongst certain eccentric people. 

" After all these bloody wars and vindictive animosities, we have 
still an unspeakable yearning toward England. When our fore- 
fathers left the old home, they pulled up many of their roots, but 
trailed along with them others, which were never snapped asunder by 
the tug of such a lengthening distance, nor have been torn out of the 



AMERICA AND ENGLAND. 4G1 

original soil by the violence of subsequent struggles, nor severed by 
the edge of the sword. 

" A mere coincidence of names," he says, " a supposititious pedi- 
gree, a silver mug on which an anciently engraved coat-of-arms has 
been half scrubbed out, a seal with an uncertain crest, an old yellow 
letter or document in faded ink, the more scantily legible the better, 
— rubbish of this kind, found in a neglected drawer, has been potent 
enough to turn the brain of many an honest Republican, especially 
if assisted by an advertisement for lost heirs, cut out of a British 
newspaper. 

" It has required nothing less than the boorishness, the stolidity, 
the self-sufficiency, the contemptuous jealous}^, the half-sagacity, 
invariably blind of one eye and often distorted of the other, that 
characterize this strange people, to compel us to be a great nation in 
our own right, instead of continuing virtually, if not in name, a 
province of their small island. What pains did the} r take to shake 
us off, and have ever since taken to keep us wide apart from them ! 
It might seem their folly, but was really their fate, or, rather, the 
providence of God, who has doubtless a work for us to do, in which 
the massive materiality of the English character would have been too 
ponderous a dead weight upon our progress." 

One of the most ingenious passages in De Tocqueville is that 
wherein he accounts for the assumptions of many hair-brained 
Americans in Europe, where, it is possible, that some of his type 
may still go, carrying all their provincialism with them. 

" An American," says this pointed writer, " is forever talking of the 
admirable equality which prevails in the United States ; aloud he 
makes it the boast of his countiy, but in secret he deplores it for 
himself ; and he aspires to show that, for his part, he is an exception 
to the general state of things which he vaunts. There is hardly an 
American to be met with who does not claim some remote kindred 
with the first founders of the colonies ; and as for the scions of the 
noble families of England, America seemed to me to be covered with 
them. When an opulent American arrives in Europe, his first care 
is to surround himself with all the luxuries of wealth ; he is so afraid 
of being taken for the plain citizen of a democracy, that he adopts a 
hundred distorted ways of bringing some new instance of his wealth 
before you every day. His house will be in the most fashionable 
part of the town ; he will always be surrounded by a host of ser- 
vants. I have heard an American complain, that in the best houses 



462 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

of Paris the society was rather mixed ; the taste which prevails there 
was not pure enough for him ; and he ventured to hint that, in his 
opinion, there was a want of elegance of manner ; he could not 
accustom himself to see wit concealed under such unpretending forms. 

" These contrasts ought not to surprise us. If the vestiges of 
former aristocratic distinctions were not so completely effaced in the 
United States, the Americans would be less simple and less tolerant 
in their own country ; they would require less, and be less fond of 
borrowed manners in ours." 

Since De Tocqueville's time we have grown more self-possessed, 
more attached to our institutions, and more cosmopolitan within our- 
selves. We have our own celebrities, and do not go in multitudes to 
look at foreigners, who mortify us for it. Our attention is turned 
from Europe to the near Orient, whence are to come the problems of 
multitude and mode which will speedily overflow the Rocky Moun- 
tains, and meet Europe half way on the plains of the Missouri, 
Destinies of colossal magnitude tower in that Asiatic mist, and with 
youth, but confidence, we accept them. This hemisphere was laid 
away for no one race ; the pilgrims and they of the caravans of the 
earth have seen our star, and at last the English Magi also. 

And ours is the government of which Emile de Girardin in " La 
Liberte" says (1868) : " The population of America, not thinned by 
any conscription, multiplies with prodigious rapidity, and the day 
may before seen, when they will number sixty or eighty millions 
of souls. This parvenue is aware of his importance and destiny. 
Hear him proudly exclaim, 4 America for Americans ! ' See him 
promising his alliance to Russia ; and we see that power which 
well knows what force is, grasp the hand of this giant of yesterday. 

" In view of his unparalleled progress and combination, what are 
the little toys with which we vex ourselves in Europe? What is this 
needle gun, we are anxious to get from Prussia, that we may beat her 
next year with it? Had we not better take from America the prin- 
ciple of liberty she embodies, out of which have come her citizen 
pride, her gigantic industry, and her formidable loyalty to the desti- 
nies of her Republican land?" 

Since America was discovered she has been a subject of revolu- 
tionary thought in Europe. The mystery of her coming forth from 
vacancy, the marvel of her wealth in gold and silver, the spectacle 
of her captives led through European capitols, filled the minds of 
men with unrest ; and unrest is the first stage of revolution. Out of 



AMERICA AND ENGLAND. 463 

her discovery grew the European reformation in religion ; out of our 
Revolutionary War grew the revolutionary period of Europe. And 
out of our rapid development among great states and happy peoples, 
has come an emigration more wonderful than that which invaded 
Europe from Asia in the latter centuries of the Roman Empire. 
When we raised our flag on the Atlantic, Europe sent her contribu- 
tions ; it appeared on the Pacific, and all orientalism felt the signal. 
They are coming in two endless fleets, eastward and westward, and 
the highway is swung between the oceans for them to tread upon. 
We have lightened Ireland of half her weight, and Germany is 
coming by the village-load every day. England herself is sending 
the best of her working-men now (1869), and in such numbers as to 
dismay her Jack Bunsbys. What is to be the limit of this mighty 
immigration? There is extant a calculation made by the late Elka- 
nah Watson. In the year 1815, writing on the progress of the popu- 
lation of the United States, he said : — 

" In 1810 it was seven million two hundred and thirty-nine thou- 
sand nine hundred and three. The increase from 1790, the first 
census under the Constitution, has been about one-third at each 
census. Admitting that it will continue to increase in the same 
ratio, the result will be as follows : — 

" In 1820 Watson predicted . . 9,625,734, and it was in fact 9,038,151 

In 1830 " " . 12,833,045, and it was in fact 12,800,020 

In 1840 " " . . 17,116,526, and it was in fact 17,002.506 

In 1850 " " . . 23,185,368, and it was in fact 23,191,876 

In 1860 " " . . 31,753,824, and it was in fact 31,445,089 

In 1870 " " . . 42,328,432 

In 1880 " " . . 56,450,241 

In 1890 " " . . 77,266,989 

In 1900 " " . . 100,355,985" 

The accuracy of these calculations is truly wonderful, and gives 
authority to the four latter predictions. Mr. Watson added : — 

" It would be almost presumptuous to stretch our minds through the 
ensuing century ; and yet, taking as a basis one hundred million at 
the close of this century, and, in consideration of dense population, 
intestine and foreign wars, a possible subdivision, in consequence, 
with several republics, we will suppose the increase will be one-third 
in each twenty years for forty years, one-third the next thirty, and 
one-fifth for the next fifty years. It will stand thus : — 



464 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

" For 1930, in round numbers 133,000,000 

For 1940 177,000,000 

For 1970 . 236,000,000 

For 2000 . 283,000,000 

— equal to the population of China." 

But b}^ the year 1900, what will be the drained population of China ? 

In the first five months of 1869, nearly one hundred and fifteen 
thousand emigrants landed in New York. 

Astounded at this increase, the timid are reflecting that it will do 
the country more evil than good. They are producing Old Malthus 
again, that sensitive British statistician, who wanted the human race 
to stop, for fear it would over-populate the world. By that time, per- 
haps, the world will stop ; but we are not the people to stop it. Even 
the hopeful Mr. Dilke found one " old fellow who said to me, ' I don't 
want the Americans in 1900 to be two hundred millions ; but I want 
them to be happy.' " 

Now, Mr. Dilke, pray let us grow, — or is this the beginning of a 
new series of British predictions ? 

The influence of England upon America is now almost entirely of 
a passive character. We read some of her books, and sorry are we 
that we do not always pay for them ; but the British author never 
could have expected so many readers under this form of government ; 
at least he said as much. We buy a great deal of iron, and so forth, 
in England, and we like Spurgeon's Sermons, because we think he is in 
earnest. We are obliged to English capitalists who made their money 
out of us, for returning some of it at ten per cent, to give us rail- 
roads. We watch the reform question in England, and like Mr. 
Goldwin Smith and other highly-educated gentleman to come to teach 
us to be more profoundly and thoughtfully educated. We admire the 
learning of England, — for she has more learned men though not 
more learning men than we, — but we do not always take the advice 
of Mr. Carlyle. We print paper for the New York " Tribune " in 
the Falls of Niagara, and then allow the Falls to " shoot " them- 
selves. Finalty, we wish no war with England ; for that would be 
too much in the line of her policy, and it would be foolish. We pre- 
fer to read instead what Mr. Russell said about that visionary war in 
1864. 

"If the American civil war were over in 1865," said Mr. Russell, 
" there would probably be six hundred thousand men under arms, 
and there would be at least two hundred thousand more men in the 



AMERICA AND ENGLAND. 465 

States, who had served, and would take up arms against England with 
alacrity. A considerable portion of that army would indeed seek 
their discharge and go quietly back to their avocations ; but the Irish, 
Germans, etc., to whom the license of war was agreeable, would not 
be unwilling to invade Canada, and a percentage of Americans 
would doubtless eagerly seek for an opportunity of gaining against 
a foreign enemy the laurels they had not found whilst contending 
with their fellow-countrymen. Commerce, indeed, would suffer ; the 
Americans would find for the first time what it was to enter upon a 
quarrel, single-handed, with the British nation. They have hitherto 
met only the side blows and stray shots of the old mother country ; 
and they believe they have encountered the full weight of her arm, 
and the utmost extent of her energies. The wicked men who are 
striving to engage the two States in a quarrel which would cover the 
seas of the world with blood and wreck, cannot be deterred from 
their horrible work by any appeals to fear or conscience ; but the in- 
fluence of the past and of the Christian and civilized people of the 
ex-United States will, it is to be hoped, defeat their efforts, seconded 
though they may be by the prejudice, religious animosity, and national 
dislike of a portion of the people." 

This wicked class has cleaned its pipes and commenced a new tune. 
It followed Mr. Russell out of the country, as the children followed 
the Pied Piper. We hear its tootings on the other shore, to which our 
backs are turned for the present, and, remembering its half century 
of warnings and invocations, we are reminded of the best known 
poem in the language : — 

"'Beware the pine-tree's withered branch! 
Beware the awful avalanche ! ' 
This was the peasant's last good-night, — 
A voice replied far up the height: 
* Excelsior \ y " 
59 



PART II. 

FRANCE AND THE CONTINENT OF EUROPE. 



467 





NATIONAL INSTITUTIONS. 
1— Hotel des Invalides, Paris. 2— Hotel Dieu, Paris. 3— Hospital at Cincinnati. 
4— Greenwich Hospital, London, 



CHAPTER XVm. 

NEW YORK AND PARIS. 
The chief cities of the American and the European continents. 

" New York and Washington Through Line " indicates the indiffer- 
ence of the majority of American travellers to whatever lies between. 
Two hundred and twenty-six miles apart, the fast trains traverse this 
distance in nine hours, which is perhaps equal to the highest speed 
attained on American railways ; the passenger lies down in the 
sleeping-car at Washington at his usual bedtime, and while he 
dreams, his boots are blackened, and when he wakens it is at New 
York. His fare is eight dollars. 

u Through Night Service, London and Paris in nine and a half 
hours," indicates no stopping-place between, for the majority of 
English travellers. The distance is about twenty-live miles greater 
than from Washington to New York, and there is the rough Strait of Do- 
ver between, the most travelled and the most tempestuous ocean ferry in 
the world, the average time to traverse which is one hour and a half. 
The first-class fare is about fourteen dollars. The European speed 
is noticeably greater, taking the changes of baggage and passengers 
into consideration. As we must pay extra fare for a sleeping-car, 
the European must pay an extra fee to the steward on the boat, and 
both extras are vicious in system. The second-class carriages, which 
cost from two to three dollars less, to Paris, are more comfortable than 
our regular first-class cars. The Straits of Dover are as annoying 
on this line as were the former ferries at Philadelphia and Havre de 
Grace. 

There are four routes from London to Paris, and the shortest I 
have indicated ; there is but one route, practically, from Washington 
to New York. The ride between both pairs of cities is marked by 
strong and variable scenery, and the American can trace resemblances 
between the steep white bluffs and rolling seas of the strait and the 
strong scenery at the head of the Chesapeake ; between the flat and 

469 



470 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

fertile fields of New Jersey and the wide and cultivated plains of 
France. There are a dozen important towns between, but either the 
city of Philadelphia or Baltimore outnumbers the combined cities 
between London and Paris, while London and Paris, massed together 
with their interlinking cities, make five and a half millions of city 
folks, and Washington and New York, including Brooklyn massed in 
the same way, make two and a third millions. 

In some small degree London may be likened to New York, and 
Paris to Washington. . To the former two there is the same gather- 
ing of masts, the same smell of the sea, the same commercial dictator- 
ship ; a like assemblage of daring capitalists and capital ; similar 
opinions upon subjects of trade ; a thunderous newspaper press ; and 
that hold upon much of the country that the lender has upon the 
borrower, and the buyer upon the producer. The similarity in the 
landscapes of Washington and Paris has been remarked, — the same 
broken and lofty amphitheatre of wooded hills, the same running 
river, almost equal distance from the salt water,. large public build- 
ings, bureaucracy in the administration, soldiers in the streets and 
forts on the heights ; and Paris, like Washington, is the spot toward 
which the continent faces. Its "decrees" can move gold up or 
clown ; its attitude in finance or toward war makes emotion from the 
North to the Black Sea. For the rest, Washington is only the skel- 
eton of Paris, — and yet as a skeleton not without resemblance : its 
broad avenues converging upon areas strategic either for picturesque- 
ness or for military operations, — but Paris is clothed with centuries 
of power and adornments ; her population is greater than that of 
the whole assembled States of Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and the 
District of Columbia. In 1820, after the desolating wars of Bona- 
parte, her population was but seven hundred and fourteen thousand ; 
m 1866 her population was two million one hundred and fifty thou- 
sand. The population of New York, Brooklyn, and their suburbs is 
now about one million and a half. 

To compare the natural site of New York with that of Paris would 
be unjust to the latter. If neither city existed, and some fisherman 
on the island of New York were transported to Paris, he would see a 
flat plain, bordered by hillocks, divided by a clear, running stream, 
and the whole, at some considerable distance, walled round with 
pleasant rolling heights of grass and wood. If he were to embark in 
his boat for the sea, he would pass by crooked courses through a val- 
ley and plain, soft, fertile, and hill-bound, like that behind him, and 



NEW YORK AND PARIS. 471 

receiving frequent accessions from pastoral rills and little rivers, till, 
after two or three clays' sailing, he would emerge into a wide and 
gentle bay with white bluffs of shore, and headlands for its gates 
almost in sight of each other. The headland to the right would be 
the site of Havre, and that to the left, of Cherbourg. Between Paris 
and the sea he would have passed a space left between picturesque 
heights, and this would be the site of Rome. His comment upon all 
this would have been : " It is a pastoral, and a grape and grain-grow- 
ing region, but tame for a fisherman ! " 

If New York were also merely its foundation, and the pastoral 
peasant of the valley of tfye Seine were suddenly to be placed above 
it, he would feel the strong, salt neighborhood of the sea, and see a 
long, canoe-shaped island, just loosened astern from the solid land, 
moored in twice its width of water, and pointing its prow into a wide 
bay. This island is thirteen and a half miles long, and of an average 
breadth of more than a mile and a half; its entire surface of twenty- 
two miles is bold and granitic, and in profile resembling the cartila- 
gineous back of a sturgeon. Its highest altitude above the tide is 
two hundred and thirty-eight feet. A wide, salt river flows down 
either side ; to the right the majestic Hudson, a mile wide, unbroken 
by an island ; to the left, the deep East River, a third of a mile wide, 
with a chain of slender islands abreast. 

The opposite slopes of the Hudson River are high and imposing, 
and like driven " Palisades" of rock they stretch far rearward to the 
north till lost to view ; the opposite slopes of the East River are 
green knolls that rise gracefully from the water. But where the two 
rivers unite at the prow of the island to enter the bay, a sentinel 
height stands on either side, and between these the island of the city 
points to the sea. Astern of this island, tidal channels make up from 
either river to its neighbor, and discharge in sluices at opposing 
tides ; ahead of this island opens the beautiful bay, fifteen miles in 
circumference, and showing occasional small islands above its sur- 
face ; at the foot of this bay, one island, almost mountainous, stands 
in the way, so that the waters are cramped into a strait less than two 
miles wide, with one small islet in the middle and bold steeps on 
either side ; passing this strait, the waters again expand into a 
broader bay with less precipitous shores, where they receive acces- 
sions from other rivers, and move on by sandy spits and beaches to 
the ocean. But even at the ocean side one towering height holds 



472 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

guard, and shows itself to sails far off upon the sea. The ocean 
itself is only eighteen miles distant from the island of the city. 

All this would the fisherman of the Seine behold, and feel the briny 
air, like the breath of this strong seaboard landscape, — a nature cast 
in hardy countenance, yet with a largeness and breadth that touch 
the intellect of the beholder, and make him feel that he who could 
live in the sight of this scenery should have high thoughts and enter- 
prises. But as this water-bound island has two rivers, so it has two 
aisles to the sea ; for where the tidal channels in the rear make 
sluices by their opposing tides, another bay opens out from the river 
of the East, — a little archipelago indeed,. — and this again narrows 
to a slender channel, through which, when one has passed, a most 
beautiful Sound or inland sea extends eastward to the Atlantic, like 
the long inundated nave of a cathedral. This Sound is one hun- 
dred and ten miles long, and from two miles to twenty miles wide. 
The land between the two outlets to the ocean is Long Island, 
which is one hundred and forty miles long, and twelve miles wide.* 

* The author may be pardoned for citing some verses which he published a short time 
ago, if they help to make plain the topography of New York. The subject of the poem 
is " Pan Building the City ": — 

' ' Then, for the gateways of the city, reach 

A hundred leagues of golden-grained beach, — 

Long Island, stretching to Montawk away, 

And Jersey, shining to the Cape of May; 

'Twixt either, jutting o'er the ocean's brink, 

Stands nature's grandest lighthouse, Naversink. 

Within, five rivers break into the land, — 

Pive mighty fingers, whose blue-veined hand 

Makes a broad bay, by virgin zephyrs kissed, 

Slender, but granite-corded at the wrist: 

The Narrows, fastest gate of Freedom. Thence, 

Cragged for picturesqueness and defence, 

Dividing walls go sweeping, — to the left 

By the great palisaded fresh sea cleft; 

And on the right, where stark bare islets swell, 

Like drifting souls caught in the gates of hell, 

Burst by contending tides, which smoothly bound 

In soft horizons, a most slumb'rous Sound, 

Heir of the long green valleys; set between, 

One island, like an arrow-head shot down, 

Studded with lights and tints like diamond-sheen, 

Lengthwise a sceptre, profiled like a crown, 

Groom to the sea and of the land the Queen: 
'Behold! Great Pan! ' the Tritons cried, 'your town!' 



NEW YOKK AND PARIS. 473 

It is this canoe-sliaped island which is covered by the city of New 
York, — the third city of the civilized world in rank of population, the 
second in commerce, and the first in opportunities. There is no har- 
bor in Europe at all comparable with it, and Rio de Janeiro, Havana, 
and San Francisco are the only comparable ones in the world. The 
Sound, which constitutes one of its ocean approaches, is a miniature 
Mediterranean, bordered with large towns and cities, receiving 
tributary rivers from old and populous valleys, and carrying an 
inland and coastwise commerce, which is, of itself, no despicable 
navy. The River Hudson is the American Rhine, and to masculine 
tastes its sceneries are, if not so various, more grand and striking 
than those of the German river. The mainland between river and 
Sound, from which New York island is detached, is composed of 
lofty and rugged hills, holding large lakes in their hollows. The 
sea-coasts hereabout are renowned for their beaches and the infinite 
varieties of game and shell-fish which harbor in them. The flat-lands 
at the end of the heights on the opposite bank of the River Hudson 
constitute the State of New Jersey, — one of the most extensive 
gardens of fruit and vegetables in the world. And the whole of the 
island of the city is accessible to its piers by the largest shipping 
afloat. No docks are requisite here, as in Europe, to give rest to 
vessels ; they swim to the brink of the city, and shelter there like the 
ducklets beneath their mother. There is but one dock, in the English 
sense, at New York, — and that is at Brooklyn. 

For the present let us suspend a description of the human covering ■ 
of this island, and, leaving it in a state of nature as our supposititious 
peasant beheld it, recall the circumstances of its discovery and set- 
tlement. 

The. year the translation of the English Bible began (1607), Henry 
Hudson set sail to make a name and place in America. On his second 
voyage, in 1609, he entered the bay of New York, in a vessel called 
the Half Moon, and the savages from the shores swarmed out in their 
canoes, to see what could be done in the way of trade and stealing. 
This adventurous man, with a name which seems quite sonorous now 

Profound the ocean, bowing at its doors; 
Eternal as the eternal world its floors; 
Dyed in the plumages of birds its skies; 
Calm sheltered, like the strength in tender eyes; 
In infinite sublimest sceneries pent; 
Potential to inspire or make content; 
It diadems the virgin continent! " 
60 



474 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

ascended the river which commemorates it as far as Albany ; thus 
discovering — and apparently by collusion — both the metropolis 
and the State capital. On his report, which was probably as san- 
guine as that of any man who has been to New York, the Dutch East 
India Company sent two vessels out to make a settlement, for the 
purpose of prosecuting the fur-trade, — a business which afterward 
made John Jacob Astor the richest New Yorker, though he got his 
furs elsewhere. New York was thus settled from. New Amsterdam, 
in Holland, in the year 1614, and it grew steadily and stolidly, under 
Dutch government, for fifty years. It was named New Amsterdam ; 
and old Amsterdam, its colonizer, then had twenty thousand ships 
and one hundred thousand sailors of her own. The population of old 
Amsterdam, the parent of New York, was 261,455, in the year 1865, 
or less than that of Brooklyn. 

The English captured this town in 1664, and, ten years later, 
changed its name to New York. Almost all the Dutch, including 
their Governor, held over, and it is to their blood that New York 
owes much of her commercial spirit. The most characteristic act 
James II. ever did for her was to forbid her a printing-press. The 
first grammar school was established in 1702, the first newspaper in 
1725, and Columbia College, of New York, dates back to 1754. The 
city was prompt to revolt against British oppression, and suffered 
more than any other in the colonies ; for more than seven years the 
British held it, and made it a prison and a garrison, while the most 
stirring deeds of the conflict were enacted in the neighborhood. 
Hence departed the enemy's fleets on almost all their expeditions, 
and, with Newport, then the rival of New York, the island city felt 
the hardest burdens of the conquered. On the 25th of November, 
1783, the red-cross flag sailed from New York Bay, and immediately 
afterward the army of Washington marched over that part of the 
island that we have called the stern, and entered the battered old 
barrack village. At that time, by the closest computation, it was 
fifty per cent, worse off than if it had never been settled at all. The 
true age of New York city, therefore, is no more than ninety years ; 
for in ten years after the evacuation it had doubled its population. 
It had enough bricks together to make it the seat of government for 
a little while ; and here Washington, in his becoming velvet breeches 
and his hair in a bag, walked out near the spot where the " Bulls " and 
" Bears" contend at the present day, and said most reverently, as if 
he were taking a sacrament, the oath of Chief Magistrate. Here 



NEW YORK AND PARIS. 475 

Hamilton wrote the " Federalist," and Talleyrand saw him, with his 
books under his arm, going to court. Here sprang up, at the begin- 
ning of the country, the created politician, — the splendid head and car- 
riage of De Witt Clinton ; the agreeable face, and, behind it, the long, 
organizing head of Hamilton ; the lithe, suave, cold-blooded person 
of Burr ; the big joints and battle-inviting face of George Clinton ; the 
gentleman, Livingston ; the Man, Jay. 

To this day these peculiarities remain : New York is the home of 
organizing politicians and organizing commercial merchants. With 
a nucleus of Dutch and conservative English elements, its proximit}^ 
to New England has made tributary to it all that thrifty race of indi- 
vidual people who live on the Sound and its inflowing rivers. Brook- 
lyn is more nearly the metropolis of New England than Boston ; for 
Boston is chiefly itself. 

This is a city, therefore, of exclusively commercial origin. An idea 
pervaded almost every other colony. In New" England they wanted 
to form a Calvinistic nation ; in Maryland, a school of Catholic tolera- 
tion ; in Delaware, a Swedish sub-nationality ; in Virginia, a landed 
aristocracy ; but here, to New York, they came solely to trade, to 
barter, to grow rich ; and they have achieved it, they and their hetero- 
geneous posterity. To this day there are no names more honored 
than those of the old Dutch settlers, Stuyvesants, Roosevelts, Living- 
stons, Courtlandts. Their names exist in streets and squares and 
" slips" and ferries. They loved their holidays and social glasses, 
and New York has more holidays, commercial as she is, than any 
American city ; she is also one of the most convivial of our cities, 
albeit keen at a trade and particularly keen at a speculation. She is 
a popular city amongst Americans, and probably the most popular ; 
for there is little jealousy, amongst her genuine natives, of any other 
municipality in the east, however it may be arrogated by naturalized 
people from other States, who bring their love of jealousy with them 
when they settle here. Politically, New York is conservative in its 
professions, but radically American in its impulses. It is the most 
thoroughly municipal of all our cities, and also the most cosmopolitan 
of them all ; no New Yorker asks one's origin, though, if he finds it 
to be Manhattan Island, he is glad. The town is corruptly governed, 
because it is governed exclusively by politicians and the lower orders ; 
but on any great national awakening there is a marked discrepancy 
between the votes and the attitude of New York. Her militia is 
organized in the dullest periods of peace-; her people know what is 



4:76 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

abroad, and feel the first breath of national indignation ; when her 
Mayor consented to see the Union broken up, her soldiers were on 
the march to restore it. Monumentally, she is the foremost of all 
cities on the western continent, and, considering the character of the 
age, New York is probably more representative of it, for her time of 
life, than any city in the world. Had she existed in the age of 
Gothic cathedral building, she would have piled up an edifice greater 
than Cologne, Milan, or Winchester. 

New York, in a word, is essentially self-possessed, human, unde- 
generate, in the prime of youthful manhood, based upon no idiosyn- 
crasy, warmed by no fever, the outgrowth of her splendid situation, 
educated without a teacher, magnanimous by her circumstances, the 
best exemplification of a mercantile republic, with a rabble beneath 
but a sound head above. No law can make her other or better, but 
such law as is the expression of her nature. She is wild in some 
things, and has her portion of the extravagances and vices ; but com- 
pare these with their cotemporary fellows of London and Paris ! 
When it is remembered that she is the third city of the world, and 
that human nature is not all good, let the mind rest for hope upon 
her splendid charities, her ready hand and liberal purse, her general 
co-operation, in great things, with the country of which she is a part. 
And what American would blot her out, — her sails, her waters, her 
ferment, her clear American head? Who would strike out her " Trib- 
une," or even her "Herald," so like herself, at least in enterprise? 

There is much to grieve missionaries in New York ; but she is much 
larger than the missionary's own family, and even there all may not 
be perfect. When the missionary wants a text for a sermon on 
depravity he goes to New York ; when he wants a collection for his 
poor church he goes to New York ; in any event he goes to New 
York, and that is what it is to have almost a metropolis. 

The city of New York, as I have said, embraces the whole of this 
lance-shaped island, but the densely settled city covers only the lower 
half; yet the entire island is lighted with lamps, supplied with 
water, and given paved streets far into the open country. The small 
channel which divides the island from the main land to the north is 
called by the two Dutch names of Harlem and Spuyten Duyvil rivers ; 
across this channel lie extensive suburbs ; several bridges cross it ; 
amongst them that which does no other work than bring the water 
for the city from lakes thirty-two miles distant, and which of itself 
cost nine hundred thousand dollars, while the whole aqueduct of 



NEW YORK AND PARIS. 477 

which it is a part cost thirteen million dollars, and will cost twenty 
million dollars with its extensions. The eight arches of this bridge, 
of hewn masonry, are each one hundred feet high. Where the Har- 
lem River debouches into the East River, the confluence of tides from 
the Sound and the Bay produces a whirlpool called Hell Gate, which 
has been a source of vast expense, by reason of the protracted efforts 
to blast certain rocks in its eddies. Below and above Hell Gate, on 
the islands which lie in the East and Harlem Rivers are placed the 
county charities, the hospitals, insane asylums, prisons, houses of 
correction, etc., and they constitute the most magnificent series of 
charities on the globe, whether considered architectural^ or by their 
efficiency. The foreign traveller, proceeding up the Sound in the 
mighty steamers which quit the North River, turn the point of the 
city, and pass the whirlpool, might suppose these great battlemented 
buildings to be the palaces, fortresses, and barracks of some secure 
potentate. Along both sides of the East River as we descend it, 
warehouses, mills, villas, and blocks of dwellings come to the water's 
edge, and at piers of piles or stone, thousands of steamers and vessels 
are loading and discharging cargo ; there are of these piers, par ex- 
cellence, about one hundred and twenty on both rivers, and in the 
large tidal docks between, thousands of smaller tugs and vessels lie, 
fifteen hundred boats alone being engaged in the fish and oyster 
trade. Opposite the island of New York, on the shore of Long Island, 
is a series of large towns, making one consecutive city for many 
miles ; but the largest of the series is Brooklyn, which comprises a large 
city, formerly separate, called Williamsburgh, the latter lying on the 
slopes of East River, while Brooklyn proper clambers up the heights 
at the river's mouth, and extends along the bay, looking down upon 
New York as the Rhenish castle of Rolandseck looks down upon the 
island of Nonnenwerth. Between Brooklyn and Williamsburgh lies 
the United States Navy Yard, in a deep inlet where, in ships and 
shops, government has property worth twenty-five millions of dol- 
lars. 

Brooklyn (Dutch word Breucklen, broken land) was a mere village 
in 1816, and it is now larger than Naples, Madrid, or Lyons, a com- 
plete city in itself, with its own Aqueduct, City Hall, and Academy of 
Music ; between it and New York innumerable steam ferry-boats, 
looking like great ivory terrapins, ply swiftly, and fly their gay flags 
till it seems that a monstrous breed of butterflies is flaunting be- 
tween a couple of rose-bushes. Below Brooklyn, the bold shores are 



478 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

full of villas, and on an eminence amongst them, in view of the 
ocean, is the Cemetery of Greenwood, three hundred and thirty acres, 
perhaps the most beautiful that exists. It is Brooklyn that is an off- 
shoot of New York, and the abode of her merchants, clerks, and 
working people ; it has been called a city of lodging-houses, and also 
a city of churches, and it is the Passy of Paris, — the city of homes 
on the hill. It lies in the same State with New York, and has the 
same police regulations and the same police force, fifteen hundred 
men in all. 

Brooklyn has ambitious hopes of excelling New York in popula- 
tion. New York, according to the Hon. Demas Barnes, has room for 
a final population of only 1,872,000, counting twelve lots to the acre, 
and twelve persons to the lot. Her population in 1800 was 60,000 ; 
in 1820, 123,000 ; in 1840, 312,000 ; and in 1860, 814,000 ; and the 
same rate of increase would give her, in 1870, 1,300,000; and in 
1880, 2,083,000 ; which would be more than she could accommo- 
date., She would be completely full in ten years (from 1869), unless 
her increase was diverted. 

All the ferries across the River Hudson, in 1868, carried 26,524,000 
passengers ; those to Brooklyn across the East River carried 51,550,- 
000, almost twice as many. If to these we could add the arrivals by 
rail and by steamboat, the total number of persons entering New 
York might be obtained. 

Since the consolidation with Williamsburgh, in 1855, the following 
was the rate of Brooklyn's increase : — 

In 1855, 174,800 ; in 1860, 267,000 ; and in 1865, 350,000 ; and at 
three per cent, less than the above increase it would be : in 1870, 
450,000; in 1880, 1,000,000; in 1890, 2,200,000; and in 1900, 
4,800,000. This suburb of New York, therefore, compares with any 
of the outer districts of London. 

Brooklyn paid taxes as follows : in 1855, upon 123,311,000 dollars, 
and in 1868, upon 149,293,000 dollars. This should have been over 
200,000,000 dollars for 1868, which, at two per cent, taxation, would 
yield a revenue of 4,000,000 dollars. But take it at the above 
average, and Brooklyn will have, in 1880, 330,000,000 dollars ; in 
1890, 720,000,000 dollars ; and in 1900, 1,580,000,000 dollars, — or an 
amount equal to the wealth of the nation in 1810. Brooklyn already 
has about the same wealth and banking capital which New York had 
in 1830. 

At the tip of the island of New York is a green park and an old 



NEW YORK AND PARIS. 479 

fort, turned into an immigrant depot, the whole going by the name 
of The Battery. From this point the eye can wander at will over 
the city of Brooklyn, and its Bay Ridge, till it stops at the Narrows, 
where the mountainous Staten Island almost closes the boy, and here 
are the defences of New York on that side, while the Sound also has 
its fortresses, in all twelve forts, and nearly two thousand guns. 
New York is one of the most exposed cities in the world, being but 
two hours' steaming distance from sea ; but the character of the chan- 
nel is in favor of the city's defence, and this sweeps under the guns 
of a powerful fort, raised almost at the edge of the ocean on Sandy 
Hook or Spit; Staten Island has been compared to the Isle of Or- 
leans, and to the heights of Genoa and Palermo, for the splendor of 
its villas and the beauty of its shores ; behind it, a stealthy passage 
called the Kills (Dutch) gives still a third outlet to the sea, and at 
either end of the Kills, through the State of New Jerse} 7 , two rivers 
come down from the West : the Raritan and the Passaic, — on the 
former of which stands the city of Newark, nine miles from New 
York, with one hundred and twenty thousand people ; and the latter 
falls in a cataract of seventy-two feet, twice that distance from the 
same city. The State of New Jersey faces New York on the op- 
posite side of the wide North River, and a craggy height called 
Bergen, on that side, corresponds to the heights of Brooklyn, the 
two making a pair of great jaws, between which the island of 
New York lies like a human tongue. At the foot of Bergen heights, 
on the brink of the river, lie Jersey City and Hoboken, with 
perhaps fifty thousand people, and here, as on the east side, the 
ferry-boats ply incessantly throughout the twenty-four hours of the 
day and night. The North River is the great highway to the West 
and the lakes ; it is lined with populous towns, and for one hundred 
and fifty miles is navigable for steamers which can carry eight hun- 
dred passengers, and give them each a bed. Down this river tugs 
and tow-boats bring fleets of barges from Buffalo, and even from 
Chicago, which have come by way of the Erie Canal, — a work com- 
pleted in 1825, amidst well-merited rejoicings. Twelve steam railroads 
enter New York, Brooklyn, and the Jersey cities. This city started 
the first packet line to Europe, and here were made the first experi- 
ments in steam navigation, resulting in the first successful steam ves- 
sel in the world ascending the North River. The commercial energy 
of the city, though greatly discouraged during the civil war, and by 
the subsequent apathy of the national government, is still remarka- 



4:80 THE NEW WOULD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

ble. At one private shop here there is a dry dock four hundred by 
one hundred and twenty feet in dimensions, which cost two million 
one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The Sailors' Snug Harbor, 
on Staten Island, is a richly endowed charity for the mercantile ma- 
rine, with vaster property in New York real estate than all the pos- 
sessions of the English Trinity House. The pilot boats, clipper 
ships, and yachts of New York are the fastest in the world, and, 
anterior to the civil war, the steamships of the city were superior to 
any afloat. One of the richest maritime corporations in existence is 
the Pacific Mail Company, with steamers which ply to the Isthmus of 
Darien, to San Francisco, and to China, some of them costing upwards 
of half a million of dollars. 

When we come to examine the internal structure of New York, we 
shall find that it has two distinct arrangements of streets. Those of 
the upper and superior part of the island are rectangular, and consist 
of amply wide streets, named by numbers, running across the narrow 
island, the maximum number of which is in the neighborhood of Two 
Hundredth Street ; these are crossed by twelve avenues, eight hun- 
dred feet apart, which will eventually reach to the northern end of 
the island, and these again will be diagonally crossed by a grand 
boulevard drive, the longest of its kind in Christendom. 

The lower and pointed end of New York is the old city, and its 
streets have accommodated themselves to the converging shores of 
the city, so that many are cramped and crooked. From the Battery, 
where we have stood, at the cape of the island, a single broad, straight 
street, the axis of the island, runs along the summit of the central spine 
for two miles and a half; this is called Broadway, and it is the zodiac 
of New York, — the belt of all clustering and brilliancy, — so that a 
foreigner, who had explored the city, said almost w r ith truth : — 

" New York is, among cities, what one of the low r er order of mol- 
luscous animals, with a single intestinal canal, is to a creature of a 
higher development, with various organs, and full of veins and arte- 
ries* Up and down the Broadway passes the stream of life to and 
from the heart, in Wall Street. In the narrow space from water to 
water, on either side of this dry canal, there is comparatively little 
animation, and nothing at all to reward the researches of a stranger."* 

When Broadway has passed up half a mile from the Battery, it 
receives a sizable street from the east, which abuts upon a very hand- 
some church, with a tall spire, and a graveyard and monuments 
around it. The church is Trinity, the richest of Protestant Episco- 



NEW YORK AND PAKIS. 481 

pal corporations ; the street is Wall Street, the money market of 
America. 

Half a mile further up, Broadway passes a green triangular park 
of eleven acres, the acute angle of the same pointing toward the bat- 
tery ; this is the City Hall Park, the Charing Cross of New York, 
the Place du Palais Royal. Here the street railways converge, the 
newspapers are issued, the cabs wait, the eddies of people form, the 
City Hall, the courts, the telegraphs, the steam fire-engines, the ho- 
tels are clustered ; it is a cheerful chaos. The City Hall dates back 
to 1803 ; the new court-houses behind it have been years building, 
have cost vast sums extravagant^, and the end is not yet, either in 
beauty or hooking. The new Post Office will stand before the City 
Hall at the point of the Park, and will be the largest building of 
its kind extant. 

While Broadway continues straight on for a further mile and a 
half, lined with stately banks, hotels, shops, and theatres, another 
wide avenue starts from it at the Park, and sweeps to the east by a 
long arc, so that it rejoins Broadway nearly two miles further on ; 
this is the Bowery, the Cheapside of New York, — the Boulevard du 
Temple, — where the German, Jewish, and cockney element resides, 
and it is as busy and more idiosyncratic than its great rival. 

Broadway and the Bowery meet upon an oval park, three miles 
from the Battery, and here uniting, they make one street, possessing 
the characteristics of both, which crosses the island obliquely, by a 
course of three miles further, till it reaches the sparsely built dis- 
tricts, and then becomes a highway to Albany The oval park first 
cited is called Union Square. It is capable of being made the finest 
place in the world, and here stands the only equestrian statue in New 
York, — a Washington, twent} r -nine feet high, including pedestal, 
which cost thirty thousand dollars. 

At Union Park the city assumes much the appearance of parts of 
Paris, fine shops, cafes, and hotels, being intermixed with the opera, 
the circus, theatres, and assembly halls. A third of a mile further 
up Broadway there is another square, called Madison, of ten acres, 
where the resemblance to Paris is even more striking, and the thea- 
tres, hotels, and cafes are as fine as any in the world. Here Broad- 
way, continuing on obliquely, is crossed by the noblest avenue of 
residences in the city, the world-noted Fifth Avenue, bordered entire- 
ly by churches and residences for a mile and three-quarters, and at 
that distance, caught between Fifth and Eighth Avenues, and clipped 
61 



482 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

by Broadway, the Central Park stands, in the centre of the island, 
the pride and monument of the city ; eight hundred and sixty-eight 
acres of rock, lake, and rolling table-land, rising in places to the 
height of one hundred and thirty-eight feefc. It is two and a half 
miles long, and half a mile wide ; in the midst of it is a gigantic 
reservoir, around which wind thirty-five miles of carriage-drive, foot- 
path, and bridle-road. It is a model of exquisite engineering, and 
its bridges, cascades, and copses, malls, gondolas, swaus, museums, 
and flocks of deer and sheep stand in profile between the city and the 
sky, as in the hanging gardens of Babylon. All the suburbs of the 
great city are revealed from this pleasure height ; all its wealth of 
water wherein it stands, maritime like Venice, and mountainous like 
Brescia. The city of the island — which, to the lament of its in- 
habitants was not originally named " Manhattan, " after its Indian 
site — has had its troubles: its fire (1835), which burnt twenty mil- 
lions of property ; its cholera, its panics, and its riots ; but when its 
second conflagration came, gold came also from its kindred harbor 
on the Pacific, and its triumphs have since been those of Antony, its 
charms like Cleopatra's. The whole island was originally bought for 
twenty-four dollars ; its assessed property tax was lately about 
twelve millions. It has three hundred churches. Its real estate is 
esteemed the most secure and profitable investment in America. 

There are computed to be two hundred and twelve miles of streets 
in the city of New York, of which eighty-one miles are in block, 
and five miles in wooden pavement. The remainder are either sub- 
jected to cobble-stones, or await pavement. 

The amount of money to be raised by taxation, in the city of New 
York, in 1869, and expended under the direction of the Common 
Council, was four million one hundred and fifty-three thousand dol- 
lars and seventy-five cents. 

The amount to be raised in the same way, during the same period, 
and expended under the direction of the Board of Supervisors, was 
one million three hundred and two thousand four hundred and ninety- 
eight dollars and forty-eight cents. 

The assessed valuation of real and personal estate, in New York 
city, for the year 18G9, will be about one billion dollars, an increase 
of ninety million dollars over the assessment of 1868. 

All the great series of works now undertaken in New York come 
under the two heads of increased communication and improved 
lodgings. The little spike-shaped island of Manhattan is over-popu- 



NEW YORK AND PARIS. 433 

lated, at the lower end, and at the upper end completely absorbed by 
speculators in city lots. There is almost universal desire expressed 
to live cheaply in town, or to get safely and expeditiously out of 
town. Yet, at present, there is no city in the world which it is so 
difficult to quit. The depots of the two steam railroads which have 
their termini on the island are three or four miles from the seat of 
business. But one horse railroad traverses the entire longitudinal 
extent of the island. These are the only land outlets for nearly a 
million people, — two steam roads, and one tram road. On the water 
side there are about twenty regular ferries ; but a ferry involves the 
breaking of bulk, the changing of seats, a scramble and accident, and 
it makes the city doubly dear to fifty per cent, of those who would 
otherwise get away. With the present facilities for doing business, 
and residing in or near New York, one must take his choice of these 
three extreme cases : — 

1. Take the horse cars, and stand up for sixty minutes, holding to 
a strap, doubtful about one's pocket-book, oppressed with stench ; 
dismount near a depot, walk to it in the dismal suburb, and stand 
the chance of having missed the train. Catching the train, stand up, 
perhaps, again, and dismount in some deep defile, with the road to 
one's home pointing upwards at an angle of forty-five degrees, and no 
conveyance waiting. Total time from business to bed, two hours. 
Total effect, disgust ; perhaps to redound upon one's children and 
wife, in satiety and a bitter spirit. Repeat this trip next morning, 
and keep at it twelve times a week. 

2. Walk to a ferry down dismal streets, and squeeze through a gate, 
carrying one's parcels, baggage, etc. Across the river stand in a 
gang, and rush for a seat in the cars. Stand or sit in the cars, as the 
lottery directs, and, dismounting about dusk somewhere ten or twenty 
miles from New York, walk home, imagining each bush a highway- 
man. If one misses the night-boat or the night-train there is no 
alternative but to stay in the city all night, to the distress and appre- 
hension of his family. If he goes down to the ferry late, he may 
beguile himself with dreams of garroters. 

3. Pay from eighteen hundred dollars to four thousand dollars a 
year in the city for house rent ; or, 

4. Board, and eat " hash." 

These are the alternatives of life in New York, — a city with the best 
markets in the world, yet expensive without parallel ; or a suburban 
home of difficult and irregular accessibility. A stranger looking at 



484 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

the various and exquisite shapes of the villas about New York, and 
seeing the picturesque perches of the villages, is unable to feel the 
penalty of a winter in the suburbs. The metropolitan problem has 
always been how to put steam highways down this long, pin-shaped 
island, already swamped with vehicles, and clamoring for streets. 
The problem is nearly solved ; for at last a tunnel underground has 
been duly chartered by the Legislature of New York, and the experi- 
ment of a mid-air railroad has proved a success. I have seen the 
cars travelling twenty feet above ground safely and swiftly, and ap- 
parently with inconvenience to nobody ; and I have ridden in them 
to my exceeding profit; for the whole panorama of the street is ex- 
posed, from house-cornice to curb-stone. The rails are supported by 
single posts of iron, of the girth of a common street lamp-post, and 
the effect of a cross-section is that of a series of very tall and nar- 
row letters T. Before next winter (1869) this " air-line " railroad 
will be in operation from the Battery to Central Park. In three or 
four years the tunnel will be finished, and from breakfast to business, 
from the last tableau of the theatre to one's country home, will be but 
a step and an express train. 

Our " palaces " in America are for the masses of the people, — 
our great hotels, — and even for the poor. What Mr. George Pea- 
body imperfectly, but generously, provided for the London poor, Mr. 
Alexander T. Stewart has more wisely provided for the poor of New 
York : mammoth hotels arranged in series of apartments, with tables 
dliote on the French plan. Table dliote means the host's family 
table, where all are invited to eat in common. The two splendid 
hotels of Mr. A. T. Stewart will cost six millions of dollars, and they 
compare with the palaces of emperors in size and convenience. 
They are six stories high, fire-proof, built of iron, and two hundred 
and five feet long by one hundred and ninety-two feet deep, covering 
forty-one thousand square feet. They are provided with steam 
elevators to ascend to the lofty floors, and with spacious court-yards. 
Three dollars a week will pay the expenses of each person in these 
splendid palaces. Mr. Stewart is an Irish-American, and the richest 
dry-goods merchant in the world. His income in 1869 was upwards 
of three millions of dollars. The Metropolitan Hotel, for the general 
public in New York, cost one million of dollars with its furniture ; 
and its water and gas pipes measure twelve miles ; it has thirteen 
thousand yards of carpet, and nearly five hundred rooms. The St. 
Nicholas Hotel cost one million, and has six hundred rooms. Even 



NEW YORK AND PARIS. 485 

larger hotels are in course of construction at present (1869), and 
perhaps the noblest hotel of them all is the Fifth Avenue, named for 
the street on which it stands. The Grand Hotel in Paris cost about 
two and a half millions of dollars, and is arranged somewhat on the 
American plan. Instead of one great office, it has offices on every 
floor. 

If the experiment of Mr. Stewart fails, it will be because the 
people of New York are neither metropolitanized nor republicanized 
enough. For great cities, cheapness must come from organization, 
as Paris has long ago learned. 

The effects of these lodging-houses and these multiplied railways 
upon the social life of New York may w T ell awaken inquiry. The 
solution of the first must lie more largely in the cookery than in the 
morals. The question of the age is this : " Has hash had its day?" 
For, as a friend of mine in New York on whom I called, said 
grimly : — 

"We are moving our boarding-house for the ninety-fifth time. 
We can't stand the hash. And," he concluded, " now I know why 
the wandering Jew was named Ahas(h)ueras ! " 

Such is New York in epitome : the Hercules of cities,with its hands 
full of golden fruit, and its labors only begun. How will it compare 
in another century, when our civilization is softened, with Paris, the 
metropolis of art and pleasure ? 

All the years of glory have burst upon Paris, and more than two 
millions of people, exclusive of three hundred thousand strangers, 
make it their home. The visitors here equal the population of St. 
Louis, Chicago, or Cincinnati. 

A hundred miles by river from the sea its water highway is a run- 
ning stream, moving at the rate of forty inches in a second ; and in 
its widest part this is only six hundred feet across. Yet by various 
devices steamboats and tugs ascend to Paris, few in number, and of 
shallow draught ; but there are a million of people here that never 
saw a full-rigged ship, except one old mock-frigate that stands for a 
bathing-house and cafe^ rotting at her cables. Lyons and Rouen are 
far better interior sites for a city ; but Paris has grown rich circum- 
stantially. 

When Julius Caesar, before Christ's birth, invaded Gaul, he found 
the banks of the Seine to be a dense forest, broken by gloomy 
marshes, while in the middle of the river a fierce tribe of Gauls, 
called Parisii, worshipped under Druid priests. Five hundred years 



4:86 THE NEW WOULD COMPAKED WITH THE OLD. 

of Roman conquests found the city scarcely bigger than this little 
island, and its aqueducts and baths in part remain to-clay. The first 
prominent Christians- here were St. Denis, and St. Genevieve, and 
the latter, a beautiful young girl, converted King Clovis, the final 
conqueror of the Romans, and became the patron saint of Paris. 
The great Charlemagne did not love Paris, and after a while the 
Kormans sailed, or poled, up the river, and burnt it. At last, when 
the kings would not help them, the Parisians proposed to whip the 
Normans on their own hook, and their most successful leaders founded 
the Capet dynasty, which confirmed Paris as the capital, and began 
the line of kings which, in our own day, the people have beheaded or 
driven into exile. While the British Empire dates from a conquest 
by foreigners, the French took its rise from a war of independence. 
Thereafter the priests and the kings endowed Paris with rich monas- 
teries, abbeys, and palaces. Out of it went crusaders, long armies 
of invasion, and parties of faction bent oh spoil and murder. Its 
greatest patrons were Francis I., Henry IV., Louis XIV., and the 
Napoleons. The histories of all these battered times have been more 
fully written than the romance of any modern cit3 r , by Dumas, and 
Sue, and Hugo. The grand revolution, the most wondrous and 
glorious ferment of men that the world ever knew, was entirely 
Parisian in origin, and, during twenty years of victory over the com- 
bined tyrants of the world, Paris was the government and pulse of 
France. Bonaparte beautified her ; Louis Philippe, the citizen-king, 
turned her superfluous palaces into public picture-galleries, fortified 
her, and made her the railway centre of the kingdom ; the existing 
ruler has taxed every chestnut-roaster and washerwoman to make her 
gorgeous. Her influence in arts, letters, thoughts, examples, sym- 
pathies, and arms is foremost amongst the cities of the world ; and 
this can be ascribed only to the fact that she is the capital of a great, 
elastic, courteous, gregarious, and intellectual nation, the head of 
the Celtic races. Our American estimates of her are all derived 
from the English, who have made war upon her, whether her govern- 
ment was free or despotic. 

Let us go up among the windmills of Montmartre, — a hill that re- 
tains the same relation to Paris that Central Park Heights has to 
New York, being the highest ground, and standing on the northern 
flank of the city. Down beneath us, on the slopes of a ridge of 
hills like ours, and in the level valley of the Seine, Paris stretches in 
an atmosphere, pure and clear as Philadelphia's, everyone of its hun- 



NEW YORK AND PARIS. 487 

dred domes, spires, and towers, cut sharp against the rolling and 
wooded horizon, and the river bending almost through the middle, 
flowing from east to west, and spanned by thirty bridges, like some 
crystal ladder. In the centre of the whole, the Seine makes two 
small islands, each of the size of three of our city blocks, and of 
these, the larger and lower one is ancient Paris, the Island of the 
City, where the Cathedral of Notre Dame and the Courts of Justice 
lie. You can see from your perch on Montmartre Hill, the two 
grand gothic towers, and the leaping buttresses of the former, its 
great flamboyant window aflame, and half a thousand carved saints 
in its canopies and pinnacles. The Palace of Justice is marked by 
the dark towers of the Conciergerie prison, where Marie Antoinette 
suffered for the sins of her class. A swaying, lofty, dense mass of 
venerable houses chokes up the quays, and this was once the great 
Paris, — no more to day than the two glasses of your spectacles 
dropped in the middle of a large newspaper. Look now at the dense 
environs of this island, and its companion the island of St. Louis. 
Both shores of the Seine are populated four miles across, and for six 
miles lengthwise of the river. Within these square miles of yellow 
stone houses (of the average height of six stories), two concentric 
streets, a hundred feet wide, planted with shade-trees, make the circle 
of the city. They are called Boulevards (Bulwarks), or streets built 
on the site of ancient walls (Boule, wall, and vert, green). The inner 
set describes a circle, with the Seine for its diameter, at least four 
miles in length, and you can see the eternal multitude of men and 
women, from where you stand, strolling down the splendid avenues of 
the gilded theatres, hotels, and cafes, making life the pursuit of hap- 
piness. Traversely crossing these Boulevards, two mighty streets go, 
straight as arrows, across Paris. One of them cuts the island of the 
city nearly in half, and is called the Boulevard of Sebastopol; the 
other passes on the north side of the Seine, at right angles to its 
rival, and leaves a broad shelf between, itself and the river. This is 
the famous Rue de Rivoli, whereon those wonderful palaces of the 
Emperor, the Tuileries, and the Louvre stand, as well as the gardens 
of the Palace, and of the Champs Elysees, and at one end it is 
bounded by the Arch of Triumph ; at the other by the monument of 
the Bastile. For pleasure-seekers, these Boulevards, and the Rue 
Rivoli, make the whole of Paris. 

The annexed diagram will convey some idea of the relative posi- 
tions of the principal streets of Paris : — 



488 



THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 



To Vincennes. 



<- 



EAST. 




Champ Elysee, 
To Boia de Boulogne. 



-> 



But these are new streets, with the smell of paint upon them. The 
labyrinthine and venerable quarters lie away yonder across the river. 
If you look from Montmartre again, you will see three separate 
domes ; the middle one, rising from a green garden, is the Palace of the 
Luxembourg, and it divides the southern side of the river into two very 
different halves, of which that to the right is the old aristocratic 
quarter, the Faubourg (or suburb) St. Germain, with the dome of 
Bonaparte's tomb dominating it ; and the other is the students' 
quarter, or the Quartier Latin, high over which the Church of St. 
Genevieve, or the Pantheon, lifts its fluted dome of granite. Beside 
Napoleon's tomb, the tall circle of the World's Exhibition stood in 
18G7. The half of the Seine nearer to you is the larger and more 
populous. That side of it to the right is the English and foreign 
aristocratic quarter ; in the middle is the quarter of shops and hotels, 
with the lorette, or gay, or "fast" quarter, between it and the eye. 
Next, to the left, is the manufacturing district, the densest of all ; 
and then the terrible suburb of St. Antoine, out of which the Red 
Republicans come when a throne is to dash to pieces. Around the 
city, on our own side of the Seine, there are steep hills extending 
afar off into the country, and two of these are cemeteries packed 
with the common and the eminent dead ; the further ones are forti- 
fied, and their lean bastion towers pierce the sky. 

On this hill, under the creaking windmills, was fired the last can- 
non for France, when Bonaparte went down, with twenty flogged 
despots lunging at him. This city, in the blue air below, has wild 
and painful contrasts in it. The highest genius, the wildest igno- 
rance, prevail here. A martial city, where to be brave is to be hu- 



NEW YORK AND PAKIS. 489 

man, and men are born with polish, like a varnished boot, woman 
has no separate existence but as man's momentary creature, to com- 
mand his brief admiration and be forgotten. Five thousand girls a 
year come to Paris. They can earn no more than thirty cents a 
day, and one-third earn but twelve cents. In a city of twenty thou- 
sand students, and three hundred thousand rich, pleasure-seeking 
strangers, the temptation to accept a profitable friendship is not long 
declined. Moreover, matrimony is often a commercial contract here. 
Women are cheap, and those who would be wives must pay their 
way. When he proposes marriage, the gallant young Frenchmen 
calls up his lady's father, and demands that her " dot" or apportion- 
ment, be settled. If it is insufficient, he can refuse her hand. It is 
men who give the " mitten " here. Out of this commercial matrimony 
respect is seldom generated ; love did not inspire it ; therefore hus- 
band and wife will love elsewhere. The man sees a face worthy to 
wear, not to wed, and gallantly spends his wife's money to engage it ; 
the wife, freshly entered into the world from the parent's rigid custo- 
dy, has all her coquetries, and love of dress yet to ensue. There is 
a double marriage with many a couple here. No such crimes as 
breach of promise of marriage, or seduction, are known to Salic or 
Gallic law. Hence infanticide is an hourly act, and seven thousand 
foundlings a year go into pauperism. The Frenchman is a natural 
gambler, and every cafe is a gambling-house, where you dare not 
show the money for which you pla}^. The treason of the State 
Church to the nation, in the French Revolution, has made scepticism 
almost national in Paris, and Sunday, in French acceptation, is a day 
that is consecrated to horse-racing. Among the noble classes of 
France the most accomplished courtiers of the world are to be 
found, and intellect is the prince of qualifications in society. For- 
eigners are always welcome at the most brilliant seances. It is 
neither polite nor safe to quarrel here. A blow is a high crime. 
The mode of settling differences is the duel. Every day in the year 
there is a hostile meeting ; but it is not generally a barbarous one like 
those in pioneer states. You are not forced to fight, if you put your- 
self in the way of a challenge, by any personal fear, or moral cow- 
ardice, but by society, that holds it worst of all to be a coward. 

Wealth buys a husband and pleasures here, but not recognition. 
Spirit, wit, talent, and person are welcome anywhere in Paris. It is 
a society to disgust an Englishman. 

" Paris," says Jules Janin, its liveliest and most incisive critic, 
62 



490 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

" is the history of all the provinces, of all the men, of all the passions 
of France. He who would be thoroughly acquainted with the great 
city of Charlemagne and of Napoleon, would be, at the same time, 
the most learned antiquarian and the greatest politician in the world." 

With more fervor, Victor Hugo calls it " the model city ; that 
pattern of well-formed capitals ; metropolis of the ideal ; august 
country of the initiative of impulse and enterprise ; centre and abode 
of mind ; a native city ; a hive of the future, compounded of Baby- 
lon and Corinth.'' 

There is no city of modern times that, by its mere mental and 
magnetic influence, so controls its empire as Paris. London, as a 
corporation, is a grand piece of feudal furniture, her oracle being the 
united voice of her shopkeepers. New York is essentially a vast 
port for the United States, but her opinion is not of binding conse- 
quence upon the national destinies. Rome is beloved and impotent 
in Italy, like the beautiful portrait of something dead. But Paris is 
generally the will of France. Her impulses obtain, from Brest to the 
Alps, almost awful respect. She rules by no chicanery, nor trades- 
man's fear, nor ecclesiastic's nod, but by her electrical beauty and 
mind, — a Cleopatra conquered, but then most conquering. The 
quickness and truthfulness of her perceptions, her sensitiveness for 
France's sake, without selfishness for herself; her proud and undis- 
puted conceit of standing guard for the country, keeping its honor 
bright, and its rank the noblest ; her courage tremendous, yet saga- 
cious, with which, when France suffers insult, she transforms herself 
from her summer carnival to a fortress of barricades, and everjr smile 
of yesterday looks frosty down a bayonet. Not in these grand pop- 
ular resistances only, but in defence of the nation's art, ethics, and 
philosoplry, Paris is the same vigilant, magnetic, conscientious senti- 
nel. Her university, and schools of science, art, and philosophy are 
inhabited by thousands of ardent youths, wearing the perpetual 
flush of high spirit and patriotism ; and these, not their instructors, 
are the faculty of France. Before their united indignation, any pro- 
fessorship is put to rout. In 18G3, a contest raged three days in the 
Faubourg St. Germain, because a professor in the Art School spoke 
with palpable disrespect of Eugenie Delacroix. When Victor Hugo 
began to write for the stage, the students carried him to success 
against the fiercest conservative opposition from priest, courtier, and 
literary rival. The schools are to-day the only element of Paris 
that the Emperor has despaired of controlling. In vain was Labou- 



NEW YORK AND PARIS. 491 

laye threatened for his lectures eulogistic of the Republic of Ameri- 
ca. Vainly does the crown destroy the Professorship of Renan. 
Yet these mercurial boys, transformed Parisians from the day they 
cross the barriers, stand in military silence when acknowledged ge- 
nius comes to teach them. At L' Boole des Beaux Arts, when Gerome 
enters, there is that respect that the masters love to receive, like the 
breaking of the wands of the rejected suitors, in Raphael, when Jo- 
seph is wedded to the virgin. At every birthday of Beranger, the 
best of all the lyrists freedom has had, the students used to carry 
him the circuit of the Boulevards, and crown him with laurel. The 
Institute of France is the galaxy of great intellects, that Louis 
Napoleon would enter when he proffered the life of Caesar for a vote. 
He has no seat there. The journalism of the cit} r is not journalism 
in either the English or American sense, — the collection of news 
and correspondence, — but a medley of the most scholarly editorial, 
and the wittiest running commentary upon the topics of the clay. 
The newspaper is the bellows here ; the book is the coal of fire. The 
literature of France has produced, in this reign, two pre-eminent 
books, — the "Miserables," by Victor Hugo, and the "History of the 
Consulat and Empire," by Thiers ; but it is doubtful that, except in 
painting, the arts and literature stand as high as in the reign of Louis 
Philippe, and during the Republic of 1848-50. The most courted 
receptions here are those of the great authors, savans, and painters. 
The returns for literary labor are princely. The jealousies of schol- 
ars are seldom coarsened by asperities, and the government of Paris 
labors to conciliate men of talent. Six public libraries, open free to 
all, contain one million six hundred thousand volumes ; three vast 
picture-galleries, free to all, contain forty-eight thousand paintings, 
and statues of every age. A menagerie, and garden of plants, free 
to all, numbers one thousand three hundred living animals, and elev- 
en thousand trees and plants. These give no idea of the inexhausti- 
ble arena of art and thought treasures gathered here, dispensed as 
freely as the elements of the world. And this is the glory of Paris, 
not her cloisters of nameless shames, the deceitfulness of the love of 
her men and women, nor — as some out of freedom's countenance 
would have us believe — the ungovernable nature of her citizens, but 
in the majesty and brightness of her intellect, and the love of country 
that inspires it. You read here no petty jealousy of Lyons, Lille, 
Rouen, and Marseilles. Confident in herself and her rightfulness, 



492 THE NEW WOELD COMPAEED WITH THE OLD. 

Paris marches on ; and when America has such a metropolis she will 
find no discussion as to her title. 

It is consequent upon such a city as I have described that it should 
stand arrayed against the present government of France. Paiis has 
never been else than republican. She shared in the ardor with which 
the people at large welcomed back Louis Napoleon, — the name of 
Bonaparte, and a republican author, — to the people's cause. In 
his scheme of usurpation she w T as incorruptible ; he usurped France 
by baptizing her Boulevards with Parisian blood, and all the fran- 
chises of the city fell at once ; her present government is a dual one, 
there being two administrative heads, — the Prefect of the Seine, 
and the Prefect of the Police, neither of them Parisians. Paris is 
really a department now, and not a municipality. Five thousand 
policemen, or sergeants de ville, armed with swords and pistols ; five 
hundred mounted policemen ; a garrison varying from thirty to sixty 
thousand troops, — these inspire obedience here, but no terror. The 
city, as the sentry of France, keeps picket duty, but does not fire on 
the enemy. Her caprices, when they come, will be as organized and 
desperate as ever. She has seldom returned a government member 
to the Corps Legislatif, or lower house, and one of the chief glories 
of the Emperor's reign has been the eloquence of the Parisian 
deputies, Favre, Carnot, Picard, Thiers, Ollivier, Pelletan, Gueroult, 
Pages, the first living orators of Europe. To avoid exciting Paris 
tinduly, she has been undisturbed in those more refined patriotisms 
which are her pride. The effort of the government is to destroy her 
influence without, by embarrassing communication through the mail 
and the press, and by exciting jealousies against her. In superficial 
respects it has succeeded ; in realities, Paris is yet the watch-tower 
of the country. 

I can only try in some figures to give an idea of the splendor of 
Paris. Here there are forty-two licensed theatres, fifty-four licensed 
halls, eight race tracks, and sixty-four churches. The city is sup- 
plied with water by four artesian wells, that are one thousand eight 
hundred feet deep, and required seven years to bore them ; by six 
steam-pumps on the Seine, and three aqueducts ; and it consumes 
every clay four hundred and eighty thousand cubic feet of the worst 
water in the world. The Ourcq aqueduct is eighty miles long, and 
cost five million dollars. Three new aqueducts have been "decreed" 
to bring w T ater from the head-waters of far streams, to measure 
unitedly two hundred .and sixty miles, and to cost twelve millions of 



NEW YOEK AND PARIS. 493 

gold dollars. One of these is under way. The sewers and subter- 
ranean streets of Paris measure, altogether, the incredible length of 
four hundred and five miles, and yet are so admirably constructed 
that one hundred and fifty workmen manage them. The catacombs 
under the city contain bones and skulls that represent the bodies of 
one million two hundred thousand dead men. There are eighty 
thousand manufacturers of all sorts here, and of these only eight 
thousand employ more than ten persons ; the various departments of 
clothing manufacture involve a capital of fifty-five millions of dol- 
lars ; the building interests of all sorts, thirty millions; gloves, 
millinery, etc., thirty-two millions ; jewelry and personal ornamenta- 
tion, thirty millions ; the printing, book-binding, stationery, etc., of 
all sorts, twelve millions ; the Custom House of Paris takes a million 
and a half dollars a year ; the octroi, or municipal tax, imposed upon 
wines, forage, and eatables entering the gates, amounts to the sum 
of nine and a half millions ; tobacco, pawn-brokering, and undertak- 
ing (burying the dead) are here government monopolies. The 
tobacco factory hires two thousand five hundred hands, half of them 
women, and no man can sell a cigar in France that is not bought 
there ; nor can anybody keep a tobacco-shop except by appointment. 
Old soldiers and their orphans get the shops. One of them on the 
Boulevard has a net income of thirty-six thousand dollars a year. 
A government funeral costs from three and a half dollars to fifteen 
hundred dollars. There are nine classes of funerals. The hospitals 
of Paris, with its other public charities, cost three and a half millions 
of dollars a year. There are five thousand persons in prison here at any 
time, and thirty thousand enter the prisons during a year. The great 
government pawn-shop, or Mt. de Piete, lends five million dollars a 
year on one million five hundred thousand articles. The stall rents 
of the principal markets make three hundred thousand dollars an- 
nually. There are only five butcheries in Paris, and together they 
cost three and a half millions of dollars. 

I recommend the gentlemen of the Xew York Common Council to 
move out here, if indeed the majority of them are not here already in 
spirit ; for the freedom and munificence with which the Emperor uses 
other people's money requires some help from the builders of the 
Metropolitan Court House, and the Harlem bridge. The Rue Rivoli 
cost thirty millions of gold dollars ; five new bridges three hundred 
thousand dollars apiece ; the new Louvre palace, fourteen millions of 
dollars, though the Emperor alleged that it should cost but five mil- 



494 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

lions ; the imperial stable cost six hundred thousand dollars, and 
one carriage in it eighteen thousand dollars ; one hundred and eighty 
carriages and three hundred grooms are among the purchases of the 
Emperor. 

The new opera house cost five and a half millions of dollars ; the 
great central market, twelve millions, with the demolitions it 
necessitates ; the Boulevard Sebastopol, twenty-five millions ; the 
Boulevards Hausmann, Malsherbes, and Beaujou, sixteen millions ; 
the avenues concentrating at Arc de Triomphe, ten millions ; the Rue 
Lafayette, four millions ; Boulevards Magenta, Richard Lenoir, 
Prince Eugene, and St. Germain, twenty-two millions ; five new 
churches, one million and a half; the belt railway around Paris, 
three millions ; the great exhibition three millions. Here are one 
hundred and forty-nine millions of dollars, not including the vast 
sums spent in perfecting the military organization, and supplying the 
luxurious tastes of a parvenue court, that when it came to France 
could hardly pay its fare. 

These disbursements the city of Paris has to pay, besides con- 
tributing her quota to the universal building schemes that agitate all 
the empire. Twenty-five per cent., two-thirds of it direct, is the 
actual government levy upon the average of incomes, besides the 
optional fines one must pay for being conscripted, and relieved from 
National Guard duty. The revenues of Paris, in 1862, were seventy- 
five millions of francs, or fifteen millions of dollars. The expen- 
ditures for the same year were two hundred and five millions of 
francs, or forty-one millions of dollars, making a debt of twenty-six 
millions in one year, and more, by thirty-six millions, than all Swit- 
zerland spent in the same year ; thirty-one millions more than all 
Denmark, and thirty-four millions more than all Sweden and Nor- 
way. Since 1862 the budget has been even more staggering, and 
the government is charged with incurring vast expenses not referred 
to in it. 

A twenty-fifth of all the French nation lives in Paris ; twenty-four 
twenty-fifths of all great Frenchmen live there, twenty twenty-fifths 
of all sad, sinning Frenchmen live there. Genius and shame, — 
mysteries to each other, and therefore half affinities, — redeemed by 
love of abstract truth and love of country, survive in Paris the 
almost universal licentiousness. A stranger arriving there on Sun- 
day, cries aloud : " The city is doomed ! It has reached the pitch of 
Babylon and Sodom ! " 



NEW YORK AND PARIS. 495 

But the secret of her preservation lies in this : that licentiousness 
in Paris slays only the body, and not the citizen. The Parisian's in- 
tellect does not expire in a debauch. His loves are all caprice, and 
what he loses of deep affection for his wife and home, he seems, by 
some anomaly of his nature, to add to his patriotism and abstract 
reverence. For, what the old Roman writer had to say, is patent yet : 
"The Gauls are a warlike and gregarious race, jealous of all but 
their women. These have no other law but the whim of their master, 
whom they love too gratefully. The men have chiefs ; but these are 
not hereditary, and last only with their talent for war and government 
The people are subordinate only to their country ; mutinous against 
even their priests ; and when they become warlike without a cause, 
the best cause their chiefs and priests can see is — the enemy." 



CHAPTER XIX. 

NAPOLEON III. AND NAPOLEONISM. 

The Emperor of France, his origin, adventures, official and private life, and his predecessors 
on the throne. — Notes upon members of his family, and particularly upon his American 
relations. 

On the site of some ancient brick tile yards (Tile-ries), which had 
moulded and baked tiles for the roofs of Paris for four hundred years, 
Catharine de Medicis began to build the Palace of the Tuileries (pro- 
nounced Twill-e-rie), in 1567, twenty years before Virginia was dis- 
covered and named. In this palace, his birthplace, dwells Charles 
Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, aged sixty-one years (1869), Emperor 
of the French, by the title of Napoleon III. He has the largest, 
salary of any monarch in Europe : five millions of dollars in gold per 
annum, direct revenue, besides the income of certain crown domains, 
the confiscated lands of the Orleans family, and other matters, bring- 
ing a gross salary or civil list of eight million four hundred thousand 
dollars ; and yet the debts charged against this revenue already 
amount to twenty million dollars. 

The palace itself stands on the flat banks of the river Seine, a quay 
on one side, a street on the other, and a garden in front. The rear 
of the palace is flanked by side walls, which in turn connect with a 
series of palaces called the Louvres^ the whole enclosing two immense 
courts. The width of these palaces and gardens is nearly one thou- 
sand feet, and the entire length is more than half a mile. Within 
them are contained every necessity of an Emperor, — the home of his 
court, his state apartments," chapel, theatre, vast stables, enormous 
and invaluable museum, relics of art and virtuoso, a great library, a 
garrison, triumphal arches, flowers, fountains, drives, trees, cafes. A 
part of the palace which the present Emperor built cost twelve and a 
quarter millions of dollars, and one hundred millions have been esti- 
mated as the value of the combined palaces and collections. To 
open a street, the Rue Rivoli, beside this palace, cost thirty millions 
of dollars, and caused the destruction of a thousand houses. 

496 




REGALIA OF STATE. 

1 -Queen's Diadem. 2 and 3-Qucen's Coronation Bracelets. 4-Prince of Wales Crown 

o-Old Imperial Crown. G-Queen's Crown. 7-Spiritual Sceptre. 8-Temporal 

Sceptre. 9-Bishop's Hat 10-Pope's Hat. 11-Regalia of Scotland. 



NAPOLEON III. AND NAPOLEONISM. 497 

The Emperor's "stud" consists of three' hundred and twenty 
horses ; he has one hundred and eighty carriages, and three hundred 
grooms. His special State Carriage cost eighteen thousand dollars, 
and the body of it is almost entirely plate glass ; a gilt eagle is at each 
corner ; it is lined with white satin covered with gold bees, and the 
straps and cords are of gold lace. The Tuileries contains the Throne 
Room, carpeted with Gobelin tapestry, which for this and three adjoin- 
ing rooms cost two hundred thousand dollars. The hangings are of 
dark-red Lyons velvet, inwrought with gold palm-leaves and wreaths. 
The throne itself is canopied with the same material, inwrought with 
small medallions of the letter " N," and the drapery suspended from 
it is studded with golden bees. Three steps lead to the Throne, 
which is a richly carved chair, backed by drapery representing an 
escutcheon, — the imperial eagle encompassed by a wreath, sur- 
mounted by a helmet with the imperial crown ; through this escutcheon 
passes a cross made by a sceptre and a hand of justice. 

To know how the Emperor looks holding court in this palace, I 
addressed a letter to Colonel John Hay, who was for a long time 
Secretary of Legation and Charge cU Affaires at the Court of the 
Tuileries, during the Ministership of Messrs. Dayton, Bigelow, and 
Dix, and he very kindly forwarded me a circumstantial description. 
The occasion was the presentation of General Dix and his legation 
at Court, in the year 1866 : — 

" A few da}^s after his presentation to the Marquis de Moustier, 
General Dix received a letter from the Grand Master of Ceremonies, 
informing him that he would be received by the Emperor on Sunda}', 
the 23d December, at two o'clock. He afterwards received a 
note from the Duke de Tascher la-Pagerie, stating that the Empress 
would receive him immediately after his audience with the Emperor. 
Colonel Hay hired a carriage and two servants, in the Rue Boissy 
d' Anglais, for himself and the associate Secretary, Hoffman. It was 
a highly respectable seeming affair, not fresh enough to look hired, 
with a couple of owlishly solemn flunkies that seemed to have been in 
the family for at least a generation. They went to the General's, 
and in a few moments came in the Baron de la Jus, Master of Cere- 
monies. He said he was very much crowded to-day with besogne, 
that he had five ministers to bring to the palace, and that therefore 
we would please excuse his hurry. Upon which we all rose and went 
to the door, where we found a court carriage, the imperial arms blaz- 
ing on the panels and the harness, drawn by four horses, and accom- 
63 



498 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

panied by two mounted outriders ; everything covered with tawdry, 
tarnished gold lace. It seemed like the triumphal car in a flourishing 
circus. Into this vehicle mounted the General and the Chamberlain, 
Hoffman and Hay following in their sham-private remise. All were 
in army uniform. They had the honors of a stare from the English 
on the asphalt of the Champs Elysees, as the party lumbered down 
to the Tuileries. 

" We were shown into a warm, cheery anteroom, with a superb 
wood fire and a view of the Tuileries Gardens, the Avenue, and the 
Arc de Triomphe. The Columbian Minister and several violet- 
colored Chamberlains were there. We talked small talk. The Cham- 
berlains all looked alike, in their violet coats and imperial mus- 
taches. You never know which one you are talking to. 

"Fane, the British Minister ad interim, came in. He was co- 
author, with Owen Meredith, of ' Taunhauser.' Hay presented him 
to General Dix. They talked Alabama, Fenians, and stuff. Then a 
stiff, gaunt Bavarian, Pergler dePerglas, and his Secretary, who seemed 
moved by rusty springs. Several more, — a Peruvian ; a blue-blooded 
Brazilian. Bigelow, our retiring minister, at last, a head taller than 
anybody. 

" There came some more violet people, and moved us into a larger 
salon. There we were presented to the Due de Cambaceres, — a 
jaunty old gentleman, lean and shaven and wigged. He bowed 
lavishly, and begged us to sit down ; which we wouldn't. 

" Bigelow in a few moments was called for to make his parting 
speech. When his audience was over, General Dix, followed by Hay 
and Hoffman, was then ushered into the presence. The General 
looked anxiously around for the Emperor, advancing undecidedly, 
until a little man, -who was standing in front of the Throne, stepped 
forward to meet him. Everybody bowed profoundly as the Due de 
Cambaceres gave the name and title of the General. The little man 
bowed, and the General, beginning to recognize in him a dim likeness 
to the Emperor's portraits, made his speech to him, — in English, as 
was proper. The Emperor listened like a wooden man. 

" I looked around the room, admiring, as I always did on great 
ceremonial occasions in France, the rich and tasteful masses of color 
which the various groups of great officers of the crown so artisti- 
cally present. Not a man's place is left to accident. A Cardinal 
dashes in a great splash of scarlet. A Cent-garde supplies an ex- 
quisite blue and gold. The yellows and the greens are furnished by 



NAPOLEON III. AND NAPOLEONISM. 499 

the representatives of law and legislation, and the Masters of Cere- 
monies fill up with an unobtrusive violet. Yet these rich lights and 
soft shadows are accessory to the central point of the picture, — the 
little man who is listening, or seeming to listen, to the General's ad- 
dress. 

"The General finishes, — hands his sealed letter of credence to 
the Emperor. He receives it, and gives it to the Duke of Bassano, 
who stands at his right. The heavy Dutch face breaks up with un- 
gainly movements of the mustache and the eyelids. He speaks in 
a wooden voice, rather rapidly, and not very distinctly. He slurs 
half his words, as rapid writers do half their letters. He makes his 
set speech (French, of course), which (with the General's) is pub- 
lished the next day in the ' Moniteur.' He then drops his official 
manner, and comes, sidelong, up to us, and talks, in English now, 
which he speaks with great satisfaction and bad grammar, about the 
coming Exposition and the American milice, etc., etc. After the 
General he turns to the Secretaries. He tells Play he is very young 
to be Col-o-nel, and talks a little about the war, etc., etc., etc. 

" He bowed, and we bowed, and backed out of the door, everybody 
bowing. We were then taken to the apartments of the Empress. 
She was charming, in a lilac walking-dress and invisible bonnet. She 
had just come from church, and received in her promenade costume. 
Time has dealt gently with her. She is still full of those wheedling 
fascinations that won her a crown. She was especially gracious to 
the General ; talked of Johnson, and the ' swing around the circle/ etc. 

" The Secretaries came in for their share of smiles and pleasant 
words. She spoke English with a charming Castilian accent, which is 
prettier than the French. 

" We left the graceful blonde Spaniard, and passed down through 
avenues of flunkeys. Found at the door the Chief Piqueur, to whom 
w T e gave two hundred and fifty francs ! (fifty dollars !) Then took 
the General in our carriage (the Emperor brings him to the palace, 
but lets him find his own way back, you know), and drove back to 
the Rue de Presbourg, Place de PEtoile, the residence of the Ameri- 
can Minister." * 

* As a companion to tho above sketch, I give the scene of the introduction of the American 
Minister, Rush, to tho Prince Ptegent George IV. : — 

" Tho Ambassador was received by the Prince Regent, almost alone, the Foreign Secre- 
tary, however, being present. Advancing with the letter of credence in his hand, signed by 
James Monroe, Mr. Itush stated in a very few words what its purport was, adding that he 



500 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

From this immense palace, shooting its truncated pavilions into 
the sky, made brilliant by the most brilliant court in Europe, and 
resonant in all its courts with the beating of drums and the coming 
and going of couriers, it is a long descent to take up the life, family, 
and adventures of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. 

He is one of three presumed heirs to the French crown. The 
originally anointed and so-called " legitimate" royal family is repre- 
sented by the Count de Chambord, whom some call Henri V., now in 
exile ; he represents the Bourbon family, who were driven out of 
France by revolution in 1830. The constitutionally appointed royal 

had been directed by the President to use all his endeavors to strengthen and prolong the 
good understanding that happily existed between the two countries. The Prince took the 
letter, handed it to Lord Castlereagh, and spoke briefly and courteously of his desire to 
maintain and extend the friendly relations existing between the two nations. That was the 
formal reception, but the Prince detained his new acquaintance to congratulate him on his 
arrival, and to inquire particularly for Mr. Adams, and other American diplomats, going 
as far back as Mr. Pinckney and Mr. King, and particularly eulogistic of the beauty of 
Mrs. Patterson, afterward Marchioness Wellesley, and her sisters, the Misses Caton, of Mary- 
land. A word or two more about the climates of the two countries closed the audience. 
The new Neapolitan Ambassador was received immediately after the levee, which succeeded. 
Mr. E-ush presented his Secretary of Legation and one of the attaches to the Prince, who 
was King in all respects except the mere title. When the levee was over, Mr. Push had to 
perform a duty imperative upon every foreign minister, after having been received by the 
sovereign. This was to ' call ' — which means to write his name in a book at the residence 
of each — upon every member of the royal family. As there were then seven royal dukes 
and their five sisters, besides Prince Leopold (afterwards 'King of the Belgians), and the 
wives of the Dukes of York and Cumberland, he must have had a long drive that day. The 
letter of credence from our republican President commenced by stating the names and 
offices of the writer and receiver, addressed the latter as ' Great and Good Friend/ and 
ended by ' Your Good Friend, James Monroe.' When the British Sovereign sends a letter 
of credence to the President of the United States, it commences and ends precisely in the 
above manner. When sovereign writes to sovereign, the letter begins, ' Sir: My Brother.' 
It may be remembered how, in 1853, the Czar Nicholas, in reply to Louis Napoleon's letter 
announcing his election to the French throne, did not address him as ' My brother,' but as 
' My friend' (Mon ami); how Napoleon, with a grim smile upon his unimpressible face said, 
' Ah! this is well, — our brothers are accidents born to us; but we choose our friends; ' and 
how, not very long afterward, he contrived the Anglo-French alliance, which poured the 
thunders of war upon the Crimea, humbled the might of Russia, and broke the heart of 
Nicholas. It is dangerous to jest with a tiger." — Dr. R. Shelton Mackenzie* 

Mr. Motley's reception by Queen Victoria, was officially announced in the London " Ga- 
zette," of Tuesday, June 22 (18C9), as follows: — 

" Windsor Castle, June 18. 

"This day, had audience of Her Majesty, John Lothrop Motley, Esq., Envoy Extraordi- 
nary, and Minister Plenipotentiary of the United States of America, to deliver his creden- 
tials; to which audience he was introduced by the Earl of Clarendon, K. G., Her Majesty's 
principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs." 



NAPOLEON III. AND NAPOLEONISM. 501 

family is represented by the Count of Paris, — who was an aide-de- 
camp to General McClellan in 1862, — now also a French exile ; he 
represents Louis Philippe and the Orleans family, driven out by revo- 
lution in 1848. 

Louis Napoleon represents the Corsican family of Napoleon Bona- 
parte, and he is the nephew both of Napoleon and of Josephine, his 
wife ; for Napoleon compelled his younger and better brother, Louis, 
to marry Hortense, the unwilling coquette and daughter of Josephine 
by her first husband. Hortense had been a milliner girl, and Louis 
had been an artillery cadet. They soon hated each other ; but she 
had three children who took the name of Napoleon, and the present 
Emperor is the third of these. His father was King of Holland at 
the time of his birth, but soon gave up that throne, and separated 
from his wife, who had also illegitimate children, notably one born in 
1811, or only three years after the Emperor, who was the son of 
Plortense and the Count de Flahault ; this was the celebrated Duke 
de Moray, afterward President of the Corps Legislatif, who was 
adopted by a nobleman of Mauritius for the sum of eight hundred 
thousand francs, and to whom Hortense left of her fortune eight thou- 
sand dollars a year. 

Many Frenchmen believe that Louis Napoleon is also illegitimate ; 
he certainly has not French features, nor spirit ; but Napoleon Bona- 
parte believed that he was, and great rejoicings were made at his 
birth ; for at that time he was one of the heirs of the throne, as the 
sons of Lucien and Jerome Bonaparte had been declared ineligible on 
account of their common marriages, Jerome marrying Elizabeth Pat- 
terson of Baltimore, Maryland, and Lucien marrying Christine Boyer, 
and refusing the crowns of Italy and Spain rather than divorce her. 
Two }*ears after his birth Louis's mother left her husband, and when, 
four years afterward, the great Napoleon was exiled, she took her chil- 
dren to Arenenberg, in Switzerland, where she had an estate. There 
young Louis and his brother had tutors b}' the Lake of Constance, 
and we have several glimpses of how Louis behaved himself. 

At one time he paid his court to a married woman who lived on the 
Mainau island. As soon as the lady's husband detected the intrigue, 
and learned that his wife at times went to Arenenberg by night in a 
boat, he locked up his faithless better half. The latter jumped out of 
window, and broke her legs. This lady's daughter married a general 
officer ; but her mother's blood flowed in her veins, and she eloped 
with an adjutant of her husband's. When the latter heard that the 



502 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

bird had flown, he contented himself with exclaiming : u Poor adju- 
tant ! how unhappy you will soon feel ! " This lady, who possessed 
a fascinating beauty and a wonderful clear complexion, was just of 
the age to be the daughter of the man at Arenenberg whom her 
mother blessed with her love. Persons living at Arenenberg can 
perfectly well remember how the elder came across to the chateau in a 
boat on those evenings when Hortense held large receptions ; and 
Louis Napoleon was thus enabled to slip unnoticed from the salon, 
and secretly pay the honors to the pretty woman who visited him. 

The prince, in his youth, was a passionate billiard-player, and 
frequently went over to Constance to play there. On one occasion 
he had a dispute with a butcher's journeyman in Leo's coffee-house. 
From words they came to blows ; and there are people still living 
in Constance who can remember Louis being thrashed by the 
butcher. 

Growing older he was sent to Augsburg, in Bavaria, to school, and 
proved tolerably apt. When, on September 2, 18G2, the old pupils of 
the Augsburg Gymnasium from 1807 to 1828, four hundred and fifty 
in number, assembled at Augsburg, Napoleon III. sent his ex-school- 
fellows five hundred bottles of champagne, and the following letter, 
in which five thousand francs for the poor of Augsburg were en- 
closed : — 

" St. Cloud Palace, August 30, 18G2. 

" Monsieur le President : — 1 have heard with the greatest interest of an 
assemblage of the former scholars of the Augsburg Gymnasium, who wish to 
celebrate by a banquet the memory of former student-years passed together, 
— and wish at least, as an ex-pupil, to take part in thought at this pleasant 
festival. I have never forgotten the time which I spent in Germany, where 
my mother found a noble hospitality, and I enjoyed the first benefits of educa- 
tion. Exile offers melancholy, though useful, experiences ; it teaches us to 
become better acquainted with foreign nations ; to estimate their good quali- 
ties and worth at the right value ; and if we are hereafter so fortunate as to 
tread once again the soil of our native land, we still retain the most friendly 
recollections — which keep alive in spite of time and politics — of the regions 
in which the years of youth were passed. Your meeting affords me the op- 
portunity to express these, my feelings, to you. Keceive them as a proof 
of my hearty sympathy, and the esteem with which I am your well-dis- 
posed 

" Napoleon." 

When Louis was still the homeless son of the Count de St. Leu, 
he said at a masked ball in Florence to Fenimore Cooper, the Amer- 



NAPOLEON III. AND NAPOLEONISM. 503 

ican novelist, " The world is little more than a masquer ad e." When 
still quite a boy, he went on to say to Sir. Cooper that he had also 
performed a masquerade, though unconsciously. During the few 
days between his father's abdication of the throne and the incorpora- 
tion of Holland with France, he was titular King of Holland ; and, 
in that quality, was one morning, just as he was eating some cakes, 
requested to receive a deputation. While the orator was praising 
the virtues of the abdicated King, his father, the thought of being 
deprived of his cakes produced such a violent effect upon him that he 
burst into a loud roar. " The gentlemen of the deputation, and all 
the courtiers present," Louis Napoleon went on to say, "outvied 
each other in exclamations of delight at my excellent and gentle 
temper, as if it had been so affected by love for my father. But I 
had played my first masquerade." 

Louis Napoleon, according to some authorities, was very piously 
trained by his mother. He was expected to pray, on his knees, every 
morning and evening. Hortense frequently went to the chapel of 
Schwaderloh, where she confessed to the chaplain, who was acquainted 
with the French language. In the evening, too, when she went on 
the lake with Louis, she often let her guitar fall, and prayed fervently, 
to which the evening bells from nearly twenty village-churches cer- 
tainly invited her. 

Hortense was undoubtedly an accomplished woman, and fond of 
her children, but absorbed in pleasure ; and the two brothers took 
lessons in soldiering, so that when a revolution broke out in the Pope's 
government, both the boys engaged in it, when the eldest died of 
fever and fatigue, and Louis would have died but for his mother. 
After this, the son and mother wandered about, expelled from place 
after place, Bohemian in every sense but poverty, and always finding 
rest at last in Arenenberg. The young man kept at his studies, and 
pondered upon what use the world had for him, when, in 1832, the 
captive son of Napoleon Bonaparte died at Vienna, and this made 
Louis the heir of the Bonaparte party, if there should be any left of 
it. From this time forward he began to court publicit} r , to publish 
democratic books, and military essa}~s ; in short, to draw upon himself 
the attention of whatever Frenchmen were dissatisfied with the gov- 
ernment of Louis Philippe. In 1836 he so far satisfied himself that 
he had partisans in France, that he put himself at the head of a set 
of adventurers, and attempted to seize the fortified city of Stras- 
bourg. The failure was ridiculous, and he was marched to Paris, but 



504 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

the government was afraid to try him by a French jury, on account 
of the popularity of his family ; so he was shipped off to the United 
States, at the age of twenty-eight. 

When Louis was preparing for the Strasbourg affair, and friends 
warned him of the dangerous nature of the undertaking, he said, 
" The French will understand me, even if it fails ; the rest of the 
world will take me for a fool — and that is good." 

" How could you hope," said his aunt, " to govern this ungoverna- 
ble land, even supposing that a coup de main succeeded ? " 

" My dear aunt, there is a very simple way of governing France, 
— she must have a war every three years." 

At New York, Louis was an object of interest ; but his stay was 
short. 

He went to Baltimore, and visited his brother-in-law, Murat. The 
latter was thirty-five years of age at the time, and had passed through 
a life of adventure. Born at Milan, in 1801, as the son of General- 
of-Division Joachim Murat, he was afterwards Duke of Cleve, and 
Crown-Prince of Naples ; but after the death of his father he returned 
to the obscurity of a poor life. On passing over to America, he ex- 
isted for years as postmaster in a small town, until the European 
movement of 1830 urged him back to the Old World. Once again a 
bright star seemed to have arisen for him, when he commanded the 
foreign legion in Belgium, in 1831. But this part was speedily 
played out, and the Colonel soon exchanged the sword for the pen 
again. He returned to America, which country he was so thoroughly 
acquainted with, that he wrote a book about it, in favor of slavery. 
Lie became first a lawyer in Georgia, and then a planter in Florida ; 
but neither profession was very flourishing. Hence he proceeded 
with his family to Baltimore, where the Pattersons gave him a 
chance. Supported by them, he started as a merchant in Baltimore, 
and in a short time made a very considerable fortune. One day 
the ex-Prince of Cleve was standing at his desk, and looking through 
'the glass door at the office in which his clerks were at work ; Sum- 
merson, the head clerk, came in, and announced a stranger : " Mr. 
Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, from Europe." 

The brother of the above Murat married in America, as also did 
Jerome Napoleon, that younger brother of the first Emperor, who 
fired the first shot at Waterloo ; the latter was requested to divorce 
his wife by his brother, and he cravenly did so, marrying the daughter 
of the King of Wurtemberg, by whom he had children, now in high 



NAPOLEON III. AND NAPOLEONISM. 505 

favor in Paris, while Jerome Patterson Bonaparte still lives in Balti- 
more, and is said to bear a striking resemblance to his immortal 
uncle. 

On the clay when the death of old Prince Jerome, ex-King of West- 
phalia, became known in Paris (1863), his wife, Madame Patterson, 
then nearly eighty years of age, might be seen going through the 
streets in her usual dress, quite careless, as if nothing had happened. 
She was aware of the death ; but what was Jerome to her, from whom 
she had been parted for fifty-five years ? " Everybody/' sa}*s an 
anonymous writer, "was acquainted with Madame Patterson's eccen- 
tricities, in Baltimore. The lady might frequently be seen making 
purchases at the public market ; she frequently, too, collected her 
own rents, and dabbled in the funds. She always wore an elegant 
coronet, glistening with diamonds of the purest water. Her arms 
were white and plump as those of a girl of sixteen. She was a most 
zealous royalist, and considered republics low. Her greatest ambition 
was to hear from her grandson, Jerome, who was serving in the 
French army. He received the greater portion of her income. She 
is supposed to have left him her considerable fortune, as she was on bad 
terms with her son. He always kept too expensive a house for her. 
He is a thorough gentleman, and a member of the Baltimore aristoc- 
racy, although he is not remarkable for anything beyond a passion 
for fine horses. He is considered the best judge of horses in Balti- 
more, and keeps a magnificent stud. 

66 In order to save the expense of a separate household, Madame 
Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte lived in a boarding-house, where 
everything was on the cheapest and most modest scale. For this 
reason she was considered miserly. She could be seen daily on the 
wharves, in the business regions, and on the Exchange. She had 
the sum of five hundred thousand dollars at her disposal at any 
moment. 

"In her religious views she was as original as on other points. 
She went daily to church, accompanied by a negro, who held an open 
umbrella over her. The negro had a pra}^er-book under his arm, and 
was elegantly dressed, like a dandy. Madame Patterson was sup- 
posed to be an admirer of Tom Paine ; and, though she attended 
church daily, she abused the clergy terribly. 

11 Her grandson, whom she educated at the military school of "West 
Point, is serving as an officer in the French army. She has been 
64 



506 THE NEW WORLD COMPAEED WITH THE OLD, 

estranged for years from her brothers, who are respectable merchants 
in Baltimore." 

All of which, being in the library of the Capitol, is here reproduced, 
and left for solemn reflection. 

Louis Napoleon was summoned home to see his mother die, and he 
was by her side when she expired, at the age of fifty-four. Immedi- 
ately afterward, Louis Philippe demanded his expulsion from Switzer- 
land, and he was forced to go to England, where he meditated his 
destiny anew. 

" What he always longed for," says Kinglake, " was to be able to 
seize and draw upon himself the wondering attention of mankind ; 
and the accident of his birth having marked out for him the throne 
of the first Napoleon as an object upon which he might fasten a 
hope, his craving for conspicuousness, though it had its true root in 
vanity, soon came to resemble ambition ; but the mental isolation in 
which he was kept, by the nature of his aims and his studies, the 
seeming poverty of his intellect, his blank, wooden looks, and above 
all, perhaps, the supposed remoteness of his chances of success, — 
these sources of discouragement, contrasting with the grandeur of 
the object at which he aimed, caused his pretension to be looked upon 
as something merely comic and odd. Linked with this, his passion- 
ate desire to attain to a height from which he might see the world 
gazing up at him, there was a strong and almost eccentric fondness 
for the artifices by which the framer of a melodrama, the stage- 
manager, and the stage-hero, combine to produce their effects." 

In England, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte became a subject of curios- 
ity, and there he published the " Iclees Napoleonnes," which attracted 
attention, chiefly in France. He became acquainted with many young 
noblemen, and during a period of riot was sworn in as a London 
constable. In 1840, the remains of the first Napoleon were brought 
home to France with much pomp, and Louis hastened to take advan- 
tage of the revived popularity of his family name, by hiring a steam- 
boat, filling it with a recruited party of his adherents, and making a 
descent upon the town of Boulogne. The patience of Louis Philippe 
now gave out, and after a trial, when the filibuster broke clown in 
making a speech, he was condemned to perpetual imprisonment at 
Ham, a fortress. He .worked at authorship here for five years, and 
then escaped. Immediately afterward, his father, Louis, died at Leg- 
horn, in Italy, aged sixty-eight. Lucien Bonaparte died in 1840, and 



NAPOLEON III. AND NAPOLEONISM. 507 

Joseph in 1844. The latter lived long at Bordentown, in New Jer- 
sey, and he was perhaps the best of his family. 

The English papers, now very deferential to Louis Napoleon, were 
in these days very sharp on Louis Napoleon. " Punch " represented 
him running through the streets of Boulogne, with an eagle under his 
arm, and his uncle's hat on the point of his sword. In another article, 
cle, headed " The Marriage Market/' the later Prince President was 
represented as a desirable bridegroom. The firm of Coburg, which has 
from time immemorial been prepared to supply all the ccftirts of Europe 
with brides and bridegrooms at the shortest notice, feels the liveliest 
pleasure at Louis Napoleon's election as President, because he is still 
a bachelor ; and as the firm has not as yet supplied a Presidentess, it 
will be proud to serve his republican highness most promptly and 
respectably. This was resolved on at a family congress, somewhere 
in Saxony, as "Punch" happened to know. 

In 1848, the French people found Louis Philippe intriguing for a 
more arbitrary government, and they drove him out of France. A 
republic was declared, and Louis Napoleon hastened to Paris, where 
the provisional government, being acquainted with his ambitious de- 
signs, and his unscrupulous character, ordered him to quit the coun- 
try. His old fellow-filibusters, the gamblers in his name and star, 
Persigny, Maupas, and De Moray, set the wires to work, however, 
and he was elected a deputy to the National Assembly from four 
places. His character and patriotism being challenged, he gave up 
his seat temporarily, and left the country ; but his crafty agents re- 
mained behind to manage his brightening fortunes. Three months 
afterward he was again elected to the Assembly by five places, and 
he returned, took his seat, and offered himself to the French people 
for the Presidency. By the popularity of his name, and the notoriety 
of his adventures, as well as by the dexterous and active management 
of his friends, he was elected to the Presidency of the Republic by 
five and a half million out of seven and a half million of votes. 
Victor Hugo describes his inauguration : — 

"It was about four o'clock in the afternoon. It was beginning to 
grow dark, and as the great hall of the Assembly was hidden in semi- 
obscurity, the chandeliers were let down from the roof, and candles 
placed in the tribune. The President gave a signal ; a door on the 
right opened, and a young man dressed in black, with the star of the 
Legion of Honor on his chest, rapidly advanced into the hall, and 
ascended the tribune. All eyes were fixed upon this man. His pale, 



508 THE NEW* WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

sickly-looking face, with the projecting, thin cheeks, which stood out 
the more in the lamp-light, his large, long nose, his upper lip over- 
shadowed by a mustache, a lock of hair hanging over a narrow 
forehead, his eyes small and dim, his whole appearance timid and 
srry, — not the slightest resemblance with the Emperor, — such was 
the citizen Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. 

" During the murmur which arose upon his entrance, he remained 
for some minutes, with his right hand thrust into his buttoned-up 
coat, stiff ancl motionless on the tribune, whose three sides bore the 
dates ' 22, 23, 24, February,' above which the words ' Liberty, Equal- 
ity, and Fraternity ' were inscribed, 

" When silence was at length restored, the President of the 
Assembly tapped several times with his mallet on the table in front 
of him, and said, when perfect quiet prevailed, ' I will read the form 
of oath, which is to this effect : ' In the presence of God, and before 
the French nation, which is here represented by the National Assem- 
bly, I swear to remain faithful to the sole and indivisible Republic, 
and to fulfil all the duties imposed on me by the Constitution/ 
The President stood as he read this binding oath, after which, citizen 
Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte raised his right hand, and said, 
in a firm, full voice, ' I swear.' 

" The President of the Assembly, still standing, continued: 'We 
call God and men as witnesses of the oath just sworn.' 

" The National Assembly accepted the oath, and ordered it to be 
printed in the c Moniteur,' and published in the same manner and 
form as the discussions of the Legislative Assembly. 

" The matter now appeared settled, and it was assumed that citizen 
Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, from this time up to the second 
Sunday in Ma} r , 1852, President of the Republic, would descend from 
the tribune. But he did not do so ; he felt an internal impulse to 
bind himself, if possible, more tightly, — to add something to the 
oath which the Constitution had demanded from him, and to prove 
how arbitrarily this oath was interpreted by him. 

" He requested permission to address the Assembly. i Speak/ 
said the President; 'you have the word.' A deeper silence and 
greater attention than before prevailed. The citizen Louis Napoleon 
unfolded a paper and read a speech. In this speech, by which he 
appointed a chosen body of his own friends to offices, he said : — 

" ' I wish, in union with you, representatives of the citizens, to 
establish society upon its true basis, to introduce democratic institu- 



NAPOLEON III. AND NAPOLEONISM. 509 

tions, and discover means calculated to alleviate the sufferings of a 
noble and intelligent people, which has just given me such a marked 
proof of its confidence. ' 

" But that which especially struck every one, which each stamped 
on his memory, and which found an echo in the heart of every honor- 
able man, was the explanation with which he commenced his address. 
' The voice of the nation and the oath I have just taken rule my 
future conduct. My duty is clearly laid clown for me ; and I shall 
carry it out as a man of honor. I shall regard all those as enemies 
of our country who seek by illegal measures to alter that which the 
whole of France has established.' 

u When he had finished his speech, the Constituent Assembly rose, 
and raised, as if from one mouth, the loud shout of ' Long live the 
Republic ! ' " 

The President, who was called "Prince" in social intercourse, was 
given a fair opportunity to make good his better promises, and for a 
little while he lived in apparent quiet at his palace of the Elysee, not 
far from the Tuileries. To most people he seemed dull and slow ; 
but those who knew best his subtle and silent character feared most 
that, when thus phlegmatic, a storm was moving in the fog. 

" There were always a few who believed in his capacity," says 
Kinglake, " and observant men had latterly remarked that from time 
to time there appeared a State Paper, understood to be the work of 
the President, which teemed with thought, and which showed that the 
writer, standing solitary and apart from the gregarious nation of 
which he was the chief, was able to contemplate it as something ex- 
ternal to himself. His long, endless study of the mind of the first 
Napoleon had caused him to adopt and imitate the Emperor's habit 
of looking down upon the French people, and treating the mighty 
nation as a substance to be studied and controlled by a foreign 
brain." 

The policy of the President, however, was stubbornly adverse to 
republicanism ; he suppressed the rising of the republicans in Rome 
by a forced intervention, and his plotters were at work throughout 
France to fill the army with ambitious dreams, and break the con- 
fidence of the people in the republic. He and they resolved upon a 
coup aVetat, or armed overthrow of the government, on the 2d of 
December, 1851, and one by one the Generals of the Arnry were 
bribed over to assist the President in breaking the oath he had taken. 
The work was to be done by Maupas and St. Arnaud. Maupas 



510 THE NEW WOELD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

assembled twenty Generals, whom he had under his command, 
and gave them to understand that they might soon be called upon to 
act against Paris, and against the Constitution. They promised a 
zealous and thorough-going obedience, although every one of them, 
from Maupas downwards, was to have the pleasing shelter of an 
order from his superior officer ; they all seem to have imagined that 
their determination was of the sort which mankind call heroic ; " for 
their panegyrist relates with pride, that when Maupas and his twenty 
Generals were entering into this league and covenant against the 
people of Paris they solemnly embraced one another." 

From time to time the common soldiery were gratified with presents 
of food and wine, as well as with an abundance of flattering words ; 
and their exasperation against the civilians was so well kept alive, 
that men used to African warfare were brought into the humor for 
calling the Parisians "Bedouins." There was massacre in the very 
sound. The army of Paris was in the temper requiredff for, during 
Louis Philippe's time several bitter conflicts had taken place between 
the people and military, and the latter had been worsted. 

The night before the coup d'etat, proclamations were stealthily 
prepared by the conspirators, and placarded about the city. 

By these proclamations the President asserted that the Assembly 
was a hot-bed of plots ; declared it dissolved ; pronounced for univer- 
sal suffrage ; proposed a new constitution ; vowed anew that his duty 
was to maintain the Republic ; and placed Paris and the twelve sur- 
rounding departments under martial law. In one of the proclama- 
tio s he appealed to the Army, and strove to whet its enmity against 
civilians by reminding it of the defeats inflicted upon the troops in 
1830 and 1848. 

The same night all the leading republican deputies, and the influen- 
tial men of Paris not in the plot, were seized and hurried off to prison, 
as well as all the Generals of the Army, and the National Guard, who 
could not be bought over. 

The object of these night arrests was that, when morning broke, 
the Army should be without Generals inclined to observe the law, 
that the Assembly should be without the machinery for convoking it, 
and that all the political parties in the state should be paralyzed by 
the disappearance of their chiefs. The number of men thus seized 
in the dark was seventy-eight. Eighteen of these were members of 
the Assembly. 

Whilst it was still dark, Morny, escorted by a body of infantry, 



NAPOLEON III. AND NAPOLEONISM. 511 

took possession of the Home Office, and prepared " to touch the 
springs of that wondrous machinery, by which a click can dictate to 
a nation. Already he began to tell the forty thousand communes 
of the enthusiasm with which the sleeping city had received the 
announcement of measures not hitherto disclosed. 

" When the light of the morning dawned, people saw the Procla- 
mation on the walls, and slowly came to hear, that numbers of the 
foremost men of France had been seized in the night-time, and 
that every General to whom the friends of law and order could look 
for help was lying in one or other of the prisons. 

" The newspapers, to which a man might run in order to know, and 
know truly, what others thought and intended, were all seized and 
stopped." 

Paralysis, as had been supposed, seized the city ; nobody could be 
found to head a demonstration, or to propose any measure of action. 

In the course of the morning, the President, accompanied by his 
uncle, Jerome Bonaparte, and Count Flahault, the father of his bas- 
tard half-brother, and attended by many general officers, and a 
numerous staff, rode through some of the streets of Paris. " It 
would seem that his theatrical bent had led Prince Louis to expect 
from this ride a kind of triumph, upon which his fortunes would hinge ; 
and certainly the unpopularity of the Assembly, and the suddenness 
and perfection of the blow which he had struck in the night, gave 
him fair grounds for his hope ; but he was hardly aware of the light 
in which his personal pretensions were regarded by the keen, laugh- 
ing people of Paris." 

A part of the Assembly got together, however, and upon the mo- 
tion of the illustrious Berryer, they resolved that the act of Louis 
Bonaparte was a forfeiture of the Presidency, and they directed the 
judges of the Supreme Court to meet and proceed to the judgment of 
the President and his accomplices. " These resolutions had just 
been voted, when a battalion of Chasseurs de Yincennes entered the 
court-yard of the Mayoralty, and began to ascend the stairs. One of 
the Vice-Presidents of the Assembly went out and summoned the 
soldiers to stop and leave the chamber free. 

" Presently afterwards, several battalions of the line, under the 
command of General Forey, afterward conqueror of Mexico, came 
up, and surrounded the Mayoralty where the Assembly was meeting. 
The Chasseurs de Yincennes were ordered to load. By and by, two 
Commissaries of Police came to the door, and, announcing that they 



512 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

had orders to clear the hall, entreated the Assembly to yield. The 
Assembly refused. The whole Assembly declared that they resisted, 
and would yield to nothing short of force. In the absence of Dupin, 
M. Benoist d'Azy had been presiding over the Assembly, and both 
he and one of the Vice-Presidents were now collared by officers of 
police, and led out. The whole Assembly followed, and, enfolded 
between files of soldiery, was marched through the streets. General 
Forey rode by the side of the column. 

tc At night a large number of the windowless vans, which are used 
for the transport of felons, were brought into the court of the barrack, 
and into these the two hundred and thirty-five members of the As- 
sembly were thrust. They were carried off, some to the Fort of 
Mount Valerian, some to the Fortress of Vincennes, and some to the 
prison of Mazas. Before the dawn of the 3d of December all the 
eminent members of the Assembly, and all the foremost Generals in 
France were lying in prison ; for now (besides General Changarnier 
and General Becleau, General Lamoriciere, General Cavaignac, and 
General Leflo, and besides Thiers and Colonel Charras, and Roger 
clu Xord, and Miot and Baze, and the others who had been seized the 
night before, and were still held fast in the jails) there were in 
prison two hundred and thirty-five of the representatives of the peo- 
ple, including, amongst others of wide renown, Berryer, Odillon 
Barrot, Barthelemy St. Hilaire, Gustave de Beaumont, Benoist d'Azy, 
the Due de Broglie, Admiral Cecile, Chambolle, De Corcelles, Du- 
faure, Duvergier de Hauranne, De Falloux, General Lauriston, Oscar 
Lafa} T ette, Lanjuinais, Lasteyrie, the Due de Luines, the Due de 
Montibello, General Radoult-Lafosse, General Oudinot, De Remusat, 
and the wise and gifted De Tocqueville. 

" Amongst the men imprisoned there were twelve statesmen, who 
had been cabinet ministers, and nine of these had been chosen by 
the President himself. 

"These were the sort of men who were within the walls of the 
prisons. Those who threw them into prison was Prince Louis Bona- 
parte, Moray, Maupas, and St. Arnaud, formerly Le Hoy, all acting 
with the advice and consent of Fiulin .de Persigny, and under the 
propulsion of Fleury." 

A portion of the citizens got together, and threw up some barri- 
cades between the Hotel de Ville, or City Hall, and the wide Boule- 
vards. 

Notwithstanding the panic of the coup d'etat there was a rem- 



NAPOLEON III. AND NAPOLEONISM. 513 

nant of the old insurrectionary forces, which was willing to try the 
experiment of throwing up a few barricades ; and there was, besides, 
a small number of men who were impelled in the same direction by 
motives of a different and almost opposite kind. These last were 
men too brave, too proud, too faithful in their love of right and free- 
dom to be capable of acquiescing for even a week in the transactions 
of the December night. The foremost of these was the illustrious 
Victor Hugo. Pie, and some of the other members of the Assembly 
w r ho had escaped seizure, formed themselves into a Committee of 
Resistance, with a view to assert by arms the supremacy of the law. 
This step they took on the second of December. 

By their personal energy these men threw up a slight barricade 
at the corner of the Rue St. Marguerite. Against this there 
marched a battalion of the 19th Regiment. u And then," says King- 
lake, " there occurred a scene, which may make one smile for a 
moment, and may then almost force one to admire the touching 
pedantry of brave men, who imagined that, without policy or war- 
like means, they could be strong with the mere strength of the 
law." Laying aside their firearms, and throwing across their 
shoulders, scarfs, which marked them as representatives of the peo- 
ple, the Deputies ranged themselves in front of the barricade, and one 
of them, Charles Baudin, held ready in his hand the book of the Con- 
stitution. When the head of the column was within a few yards of 
the barricade, it was halted. For some moments tl ere was silence. 
Law and force had met. On one side was Code Democratic, which 
France had declared to be perpetual ; on the other, a battalion of the 
line. The officer in command refused to concede what logicians 
call the " major premiss." He gave an important sign. Suddenly 
the muskets of the front rank men came down, came up, came level, 
and in another instant their fire pelted straight into the group of the 
scarfed deputies. Baudin fell dead, his head being shattered by more 
than one ball. One other was killed by the volley ; several more were 
wounded. The book of the Constitution had fallen to the ground, 
and the defenders of the law recurred to their firearms. They shot 
the officer who had caused the death of their comrade. 

There was a fight of the Homeric sort for the body of Charles 
Baudin. The battalion won it ; four soldiers carried it off. 

The greatest barricade was raised across the Boulevard in the east- 
ern quarter of Paris, and against this the main army of the usurper was 
65 



514 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

directed. Victor Hugo himself desci'ibes the scene, and from him the 
subjoined account is mainly taken : — 

" Facing this little barricade, at a distance of about a hundred and 
fifty yurds, was the head of the vast column of troops, which now 
occupied the whole of the western Boulevard, and a couple of field- 
pieces stood pointed toward the barricade. In the neutral space, 
between the barricade and the head of the column, the shops, and 
almost all the windows, were closed ; but numbers of spectators, includ- 
ing many women, crowded the foot-pavement. But westward of 
the point occupied by the head of the column, the state of the Boule- 
vards was different. From that point home to the Madeleine, the 
whole carriage-way was occupied by troops ; the infantry was drawn 
up in subdivisions at quarter distance. Along this part of the gay 
and glittering Boulevard, the windows, the balconies, and the foot 
pavements were crowded with men and women, who were gazing at 
the military display. These gazers had no reason for supposing that 
they incurred any danger, for they could see no one with whom the 
army would have to contend. It is true that notices had been placed 
upon the walls, recommending the people not to encumber the streets, 
and warning them that they would be liable to be dispersed by the 
troops, without being summoned ; but of course, those who had 
chanced to see this announcement naturally imagined that it w r as a 
menace addressed to riotous crowds which might be pressing upon the 
troops in a hostile way. 

" Suddenly, the troops at the head of the column faced about and 
opened fire ; some of the soldiery fired point blank into the mass of 
spectators who stood gazing upon them from the foot-pavement, and 
the rest of the troops fired up at the gay, crowded windows and bal- 
conies. The impulse which had thus come upon the soldiery, near 
the head of the column, was a motive akin to panic, for it was car- 
ried by swift contagion from man to man, till a column of some six- 
teen thousand men, facing eastward toward St. Denis, was suddenly 
formed as it were into an order of battle fronting southward, and 
busily firing into the crowd which lined the foot-pavement, and upon 
the men, women, and children who stood at the balconies and 
windows on that side of the Boulevard. 

" When there was no longer a crowd to fire into, the soldiers would 
aim carefully at any single fugitive who was trying to effect his 
escape ; and if a man tried to save himself by coming close up to the 
troops and asking for mercy, the soldiers would force or persuade the 



NAPOLEON III. AND NAPOLEONISM. 515 

suppliant to keep off and hasten away, and then, if they could, they 
killed him running. This slaughter of unarmed men and women 
was continued for a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes. 

" It was thus the Prince President was keeping his oath, and mean- 
time the police offices in his interest were at work. 

" Great numbers of prisoners were brought into the Prefecture of 
Police ; but it appears to have been thought inconvenient to allow the 
sound of the discharge of musketry to be heard coming from the 
precincts of the building. For that reason, as it would seem, another 
laode of quieting men was adopted. Each of the prisoners destined 
to undergo this fate w T as driven with his hands tied behind him into 
one of the courts of the prefecture, and then one of the Maupas 
police officers came and knocked him on the head with a loaded club, 
and felled him, — felled him in the way that is used by a man when 
he has to slaughter a bullock." 

At the same time the soldiery continued their butchery, and one 
officer declared that his regiment alone had killed two thousand four 
hundred men. " Supposing that his statement was anything like an 
approach to the truth, and that his corps was at all rivalled by others, 
a very high number would be wanted for covering the whole quan- 
tity of the slaughter." 

In the army which did these things the whole number of killed 
was twent}^-five. 

Paris being thus crushed, France was to be wheedled by Morny, 
the new Secretary of the Interior. 

Morny, stealing into the Home Office, had entrusted his orders, for 
instant and enthusiastic support, to the zeal of every prefect, and 
had ordered that every mayor, every juge de paix, and every other 
public functionary, who failed to give in his instant and written 
adhesion to the acts of the President, should be dismissed. 

In France, the engine of state is so constructed as to give the 
Home Office an almost irresistible power over the provinces, and the 
means which the office had of coercing France were reinforced by an 
appeal to men's fears of anarchy, and their dread of the. sect called 
" Socialists." Forty thousand communes were modestly told that 
they must make swift choice between socialism, and anarchy, and 
rapine on the one hand, and on the other a virtuous dictator and law- 
giver, recommended and warranted by the authority of Monsieur De 
Morny. 

Every department which seemed likely to move was put under 



51G THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

martial law. Then followed slaughter, banishment, imprisonment, 
sequestration, and all this at the mere pleasure <>f Generals. 

" Speaking within the limits of historical truth," says the London 
"Times" Of Hint date, u and upon the evidence of many eye-wit- 
nesses of these events, we affirm, that the bloody and treacherous 

Seeds of the 4th of December will be remembered with horror, even 
In that city which witnessed the massacre of St. Bartholomew and 
the c Reign Of Terror.' 

u None will ever know the number of men, who, at this period, 
were either killed, or imprisoned, in France, or sent to die in Africa 
or Cayenne ; but the panegyrist of Louis Bonaparte, Granier de 
Cassagnac, acknowledges that the number of people who were 
seized and transported, within the few weeks which followed the 2d 
of December, amounted to the enormous number of twenty-six 
thousand five hundred. 

" Some thousands of Frenchmen were made to undergo suHcrings 
too horrible to be here told, enclosed in the casemates in the for- 
tresses, and huddled down between the decks of the Canada and the 
Duguesclin. These hapless beings were, for the most part, men 
attached to the cause of the Republic. It would seem that, of the 
two thousand men whose sufferings are the most known, a great 
part were men whose lives had been engaged in literary pursuits ; 
for amongst them there were authors of some repute, editors of news- 
papers, and political writers of many grades, besides lawyers, physi- 
cians, and others whose labors in the field of politics had been mainly 
labors of the intellectual sort. The torments inflicted upon these 
men lasted from two to three months. " 

The massacre having been effective, Louis Napoleon submitted to 
the nation that he be declared President for tern years. The choice 
given to the electors did not even purport to be anything but a choice 
between Louis Bonaparte and nothing. According to the wording 
of the Plebiscite, a vote given for any candidate other than Louis 
Bonaparte would have been null. 

An elector was only permitted to vote " yes," or vote " no," and it 
seems plain that the prospect of anarchy involved in a negative vote 
would alone have operated as a sufficing menace. 

One thing only remained to do, — to go through the appearance of 
legitimizing the Empire, — and this was submitted to a like farcical 
form of vote. 

" Let us do homage to Napoleon ! ! ! " Thus ended the litho- 



NAPOLEON III. AND NAPOLEONISM. 517 

graphed circulars of the prefects after the coup d'etat. The three 
marks of admiration were generally taken for a Roman III., " and 
this," says one, " gave the Prince the idea of calling himself Napoleon 

III., which was the origin of many difficulties, as diplomacy had 
never recognized a Napoleon II," 

To cover this murder with glory was the next thing, and a pretext 
was found for embroiling England with France in a war against 
Russia, whose Emperor had addressed the new Emperor cavalierly. 

A short time after the coup d'etat, the Queen's speech announced to 
Europe " that the Emperor of the French had united with Her Majesty 
in earnest endeavors to reconcile differences, the continuance of which 
might involve Europe in war ; " and she declared that' 4 acting in concert 
with her Allies, and relying on the Conference, then assembled at 
Vienna, Her Majesty had good reason to hope that an honorable 
arrangement would speedily be accomplished. " The war with Russia 
and great glory followed, and the blood-stained government was 
secured. Perjury had been confirmed, and the adventurer was the 
richest Emperor in Europe. 

The French imperial succession is circumscribed very nearly as the 
first Napoleon arranged it, the families of Louis and Jerome Bonaparte 
being the only recognized channels of entail, and the descendants of 
all the other brothers merely belong to the " Family of the Emperor," 
— simple subjects with precedence above the high dignitaries. The 
imperial dignity is hereditary in the male and legitimate descendants 
of Napoleon III., in the order of primogeniture. If he shall have 
no male child, the Emperor may choose to adopt any of the male 
descendants of Napoleon I. ; but this privilege of adoption does not 
belong to his successors. If he should die without a successor, born 
or adopted, the Presidents of the two legislative chambers, jointly with 
his Council of State, elect a Sovereign, and submit the choice to a 
vote of the people. In December, 1852, Napoleon nominated his 
Uncle Jerome, and the male and legitimate descendants of his 
marriage with Catherine of Wurtemberg. This would have made 
Prince Napoleon Joseph, born 1822, the heir, — commonly called 
Prince Napoleon, — but in 1853 the Emperor married Eugenie Marie 
de Montigo, of Spain, and her child, Napoleon Eugene Louis, — or 
the Prince Imperial, — born 1856, is heir to the purple. 

As early as 1848, Napoleon offered his hand to Eugenie, in 
London ; but she is said to have declined it, with the words : — 

" You will go to Paris, and strive there to acquire power, become 



518 THE NEW WOULD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

Consul, President, or Dictator. Supposing you have attained your 
first object, will you remain standing? Will it satisfy your ambition? 
Will you not rather soar higher? You will ! But, in that case, what 
a burden a wife will be to 3-011 ! If a man wishes to become Emperor, 
he must leave the choice of an Empress open. But if you were to be 
unsuccessful in your efforts, — if things did not go as you wished; 
if France did not offer you what you expect from her, — then, but 
only then, return ; then I will give you an answer to }^our offer ; 
then remember that a heart beats in my bosom, which feels it has the 
strength to requite you for all your grief and all your foiled expecta- 
tions." 

This sounds like an extract from a play at the Porte Saint Martin, 
but it is solemnly put down by reverend clergymen, like Mr. J. S. C. 
Abbott, and ought to be valid. Had Mr. Abbott himself made that 
response, its authenticity could have been sworn to. 

Eugenie, like eve^ woman connected with the Bonapartes, except 
Marie Louise, who supplanted Josephine, was pretty and interesting, 
and the physical and mental superior of any Empress in Europe. 
She was sixteen years younger than her husband, and her child is 
like her, smart, and forward, and spirited. Eugenie has, it is said, a 
striking likeness to the celebrated Queen of Scots ; the same nose, 
the same characteristic eyebrows, the same golden hair, the same 
white complexion. 

As a girl she was very rich, and had an income of five hundred 
thousand francs. She is said to have assisted Louis Napoleon during 
the presidency by selling a valuable set of pearls. The latter had 
left London owing three years' rent, without counting his numerous 
tradesmen's bills. 

The Parisians do not like the Empress, as she is a devoted adhe- 
rent of the Pope ; but considering her place and her origin, she has 
certainly been a brilliant woman, and given the lustre of beauty and 
benevolence to the dynasty. Her son has a dangerous path before 
him, and she must often lament that he was born upon such heights 
of dizziness. At present, all of them have means and pleasure in 
abundance. Their palaces are numerous ; but St. Cloud is their 
suburban palace, and Fontainebleau and Compeigne their principal 
summer chateaux. The Emperor is an abstruse politician, sufficiently 
French himself to take naturally to war, oratory, and public excite- 
ment, and sufficiently Dutch, perhaps, to blend with these brilliant 
parts the cold, phlegmatic judgment of the house of Orange. In 



NAPOLEON III. AND NAPOLEONISM. 519 

America he would be called an astute, selfish politician, anxious to 
achieve public glory, provided it were attributed to himself. In 
Europe he receives the additional significance of descent, which on one 
side makes him hated by the aristocrats, and on the other reverenced 
by the ignorant peasantry. Between the two the Republicans recog- 
nize his adroitness, upbraid him as a traitor to the liberties of his 
country and of Europe, and employ all the abilities they can com- 
mand with safety, to destroy the illusion of his name, and to coun- 
teract the power of his policy. He also is conscious of his weak- 
ness and his strength, and is no despiser of his enemies. Perhaps he 
feels that 

"Things bad begun make bad themselves by ill ; " 

and he is at work industriously to make his reign an example of 
beneficence and glor}^, so that its remembrance shall be its bulwark 
when his crafty hands are folded upon his breast. 

The Emperor's mode of life is, for periods, very regular and 
moderate. He rises at an early hour, and spends a ver}^ considerable 
portion of the day at his study-table. His learning is great, and 
his education was a conscientiously German one. He speaks French, 
German, and English well, understands Latin and Italian, has care- 
fully studied geography, history, and social economy, is well versed 
in mathematics and physics, and is a well-trained artillery officer. 
He very moderately indulges in the joys of the table ; but in other 
indulgences is far from blameless. In his character he unites the 
cold tranquillity and unbending obstinacy of the Dutchman w T ith the 
lively resolution of the Frenchman. In the Italian campaign of 
1859 he is said to have displayed much cold resolution. As to his 
real talent as commander, the voices of the French officers are 
greatly divided. Many assert that he possesses it, and that himself 
drew up in great measure the plan of that campaign, wiiile others 
ascribe the plan to Mareehal Niel, although they allow the Emperor 
to be possessed of the valuable quality of recognizing the excellence 
of other plans, subordinating himself to them, and carrying them out 
energetically. He is, at any rate, a good, if not a brilliant, soldier, 
and possesses the confidence of his army, if he does not arouse its 
enthusiasm. He has not the least wit or talent for declamation ; has 
no fancy, artistic talent, or the slightest taste for any art ; and 
though he may favor the arts, and lavish millions on prominent 
artists, he only does so because he believes that it heightens the lustre 



520 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

of his government. He is very cold toward the creations of the 
poetic art, and even in his youth he did not write a single verse, 
though he translated many German lines into French. Thus, for 
instance, he translated Schiller's " Ideal " in his Strasburg prison. 

Napoleon, as a rule, enjoys excellent health. It is true he no 
longer has the elasticity of youth, and the signs of age are gradually 
becoming more prominent. His back is getting bent, his step more 
measured, his eye watery, his forehead wrinkled, his hair scanty, 
and his expression weak. But, then, the Emperor was never a hand- 
some man. 

Strollers in the forest of Fontainebleau notice, on returning at a 
late hour, a lighted room in the corner of the chateau, with the win- 
dows usually open to admit the evening breeze. The inhabitants 
know it to be the Emperor's study ; and when they wish to learn 
whether the Emperor is at a concert or ball, they take a glance at the 
eastern pavilion, where the lamp frequently burns till one a. m. 
The Emperor rises at an early hour, and takes a sharp walk with an 
adjutant or the Imperial Prince. He returns at eight o'clock. He 
goes through the letters with his private secretary, and the news- 
papers, especially the London " Times " and a German journal. 
After this, he breakfasts with the Empress and the Prince. As a rule, 
only three persons are invited to breakfast, generally belonging to the 
department. At noon the auditor of the Council of State attends 
him in his Cabinet, with the despatch-bag from Paris. Very fre- 
quently a minister works with the Emperor till two o'clock ; then he 
rides out with the Empress and his guests. At the dinner-table there 
is very great ceremony, in which the Imperial Prince takes but little 
pleasure. The ladies and gentlemen are in full dress ; and the Pre- 
fect, General, Bishop, or other notabilities of the department, occupy 
the seats of honor. If, after dinner, there is no soiree, concert, or 
ball, the guests do what they please. The evening parties are 
neither musical nor learned, but all the more amusing. There is gen- 
erally a good deal of noise near the Empress' salon; for the Impe- 
rial Prince has his guests too, who are apt to forget rank, etiquette, 
and discipline. The party breaks up at eleven o'clock, after the Em- 
press has arranged the programme for the next da} T , which, however, 
binds nobody. The Emperor often rides out in the evening. On his 
return, at eleven o'clock, he is accustomed to arrange his work for 
the next day in his Cabinet. 

The principal other ladies of the imperial family are the Spanish 



NAPOLEON III. AND NAPOLEONISM. 521 

mother of Eugenie, who has become very rich by speculating on gov- 
ernment secrets, and whom the Parisians call the "Crocodile ; " the 
Princess Mathilde, Prince Napoleon's sister, who is divorced from her 
Russian husband, Prince DemidorT; Clotilde, daughter of the King of 
Italy, who is married to that gifted sensualist, Prince Napoleon, 
nineteen years her senior ; the latter is the most popular member of 
the imperial house. 

The national republican song of France, the " Marseillaise, " has 
been set aside by the Emperor, for a song composed by his mother, 
Hortense, entitled " Partant pour la Syrie." 

So much of politics has been said in this book that my lady readers 
may be diverted by some notes of a visit that I made to the tombs 
of the Emperor's mother and grandmother, Hortense and Josephine, 
in the year 1864. They lie buried in the little village church of Rueil, 
nine miles from Paris, and I passed through the town with some 
friends to look first at their home of Malmaison, near by. 

Stealing away from the church square, passing a flower and vege- 
table market, turning into the high road again, and leaving Rueil be- 
hind, we came at last to a green lane with high stone walls on either 
side, and, after a few moments' thoughtful walking, stood at the gate 
of Malmaison. 

Malmaison had received its name " Mala-Domus," from having 
once been the home of Norman adventurers, who had been cursed by 
the people. But since that time it had been exorcised and sanctified 
as a monastery, and finally had been turned into a country-house. 
Bonaparte, before embarking for Egypt, had written to Josephine to 
secure a country residence for his return. She hesitated some time 
between Ris and Malmaison, but decided in favor of the latter. 

When the General became First Consul, he installed himself in the 
Luxembourg ; but the Palace of the Medicis w r as only his political 
residence ; his leisure hours were spent at Malmaison. The dignified 
silence and severe etiquette which became afterward the law at the 
Imperial Palaces of St. Cloud and the Tuileries were then unknown. 
It was at that time not an uncommon thing to play at "prisoner's 
base" here. On one side were Bonaparte, Lauriston, Rapp, Eugene, 
and the Demoiselles Anguie ; on the other, Josephine, Hortense, 
Jerome, Madame Caroline Murat, Isabey Didelot, and DeLacay. They 
were all young people. The game would be followed by a cotillon, 
and in the evening by a play performed by themselves, 

\ 

§6 



522 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

After many pleasant years passed here with Josephine, the house 
was given to the Empress after her repudiation. When Bonaparte 
resolved to divorce Josephine, childless to him, Hortense and Eugene, 
her own children, were, strangely enough, selected by the Emperor to 
convey the sad intelligence to the Empress ; but he knew that he could 
rely upon their boundless devotion. The scenes that followed have 
been described by a Prefect of the Palace, in his " Memoirs." The 
same children were also summoned to be present at the nuptials of 
the Emperor and Maria Louise, and the Queen of Holland, Hortense, 
was one of the four to bear a corner of the mantle of the Empress, 
who usurped the place of her own mother. 

Malmaison now belongs to Louis Napoleon. An old wounded 
grenadier kept the lodge, but was prohibited from granting us admis- 
sion ; so he chatted with us as we looked through the bars upon the 
long, white building, steep-roofed, and flanked by turrets and huge 
chimneys. A carriage passed round the smooth lawns ; there were 
few large trees save beyond the house, where a beautiful wood bor- 
dered a hill-side ; but close by the gate were flower-beds, whose per- 
fumes blew upon us, as if to give us some sweet thing to carry across 
the seas. Here Josephine received visits from the Czar, and King of 
Prussia ; but all her days were sad ones. She could not drive from 
her mind the memory of the grand court, and her sunburnt soldier, 
slumbering beside his young princess, and the gossip of the court 
ladies pitying her, who used to be their Queen. Here she died, in 
the arms of her children, in the spring of the year, in the montli of 
May, neither poor nor unloved, but repudiated ! Soon after her en- 
tombment the beaten Conqueror came back from Waterloo, and bade 
his few attendants adieu from this threshold, and turned into the 
deserted place to see the relics of the only being who ever loved him. 
Soon he lay on the rock of Saint Helena, and she was at rest in the 
vault of Pueil. 

Critics have been divided as to the influence and merits of Jose- 
phine, but the ladies cling devotedly to the superstition of her good- 
ness. Whatever be the cold historic truth, this remains : he was a 
tryant, she was unhappy. With all our reasoning, we feel that Jose- 
phine is the only soft, human episode in the biograplry of Bonaparte. 
Love, redeeming love, whether in cottage, or palace, covers a multi- 
tude of sins. We turn with relief from the glaring sun of Austerlitz, 
from the glory of Marengo, and the marvel of Jena, and the long, 



NAPOLEON III. AND NAPOLEONISM. 523 

bloody trail of Moscow, to this fond, foolish, beautiful woman, the 
thought of whom lightened the conqueror's bivouac dreams. 

Returning to the little church of Rueil, we turned at the end of 
the mass, to the high altar, and saw set in the wall, on either side, 
the tomb of Josephine to the right, and that of her daughter Hor- 
tense to the left. The first of these was the grandmother, the sec- 
ond, the mother of the present Emperor of the French. 

The tombs were each of Carrara marble, fifteen feet high perhaps ; 
Josephine's was by Castellier, and represented the Empress in the 
long, rich robes of the court, kneeling upon a cushion, and with 
clasped hands, before a marble prie-dieu. The latter was too low. 
The statue, while not a chef d'oeuvre, was a correct and pleasing 
one, representing a beautiful woman, with a saddened, resigned. face, 
and it was enclosed by columns and an entablature, the latter 
oddly carved. Below was this inscription : — 

A. 

Josephine. 

Eugene. Et Hortense. 

1825. 

Her son and daughter raised the monument. The tomb of the 
beautiful, wilful, and gifted Hortense stood opposite. 

The remains of Queen Hortense were transferred from Switzerland 
to Rueil, by Count de Tascher de la Pagerie, her cousin (Josephine 
was a De Tascher, de la Pagerie), and were deposited in a catacomb 
opposite to that of the Empress Josephine, in this ancient church of 
the Lords of Burenval. A mausoleum was raised over the vault in 
1845, by Bartolini, of Florence ; but one of the first melancholy 
duties of Louis Napoleon was to save the Church of Rueil from the 
ruin by which it was threatened. 

Partner in brightness and sorrow with Josephine was Marie 
Antoinette, her predecessor upon the throne, and there is an anec- 
dote told about the present Emperor and those beheaded Bourbons 
which may be worth relating : — 

When Hortense went to live in the palace in the Rue d'Aiijou St. 
Honor e, she found that Louis XIV., and Marie Antoinette were 



524 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

buried at no great distance from the Madeleine church-yard. An old 
royalist, Duseausaux, had guarded and tended the graves for upwards 
of twenty years. He had a cottage close by. Hortense visited him, 
and asked to be shown the graves. She at once shared with the old 
man the duty of keeping this grave in order, and it continually grew 
more and more charming ; ere long it was entirely concealed by a 
mound of Parma violets. The old. man died, and Hortense became 
the sole keeper of the graves. The children accompanied her when 
she visited them from time to time ; they did not know who slept 
beneath the fragrant violets, — they only saw the tears in their 
mother's eyes, and clasped their hands as they saw their mother clasp 
hers. 

" Louis Napoleon," says a rapturous Englishman, " praying at the 
grave of Louis XIV. and Marie Antoinette, and not knowing for 
whom he prayed ! What a picture ! " 

The Court of the Tuileries alone might fail to satisfy curiosity in 
a volume, and it has been the subject of many ; and the subordinate 
palaces of the Emperor would of themselves make the whole con- 
tents of a book like this. Each of the imperial country residences 
have immense forests attached, that of Fontainebleau being sixty- 
three miles in circumference, and containing forty-two thousand 
acres. 

In the year 1863 I made the tour of the forest of the Palace of 
Compeigne, and resided in the town of the palace for two months. A 
description of this imperial residence will conclude the chapter. We 
reached the edge of the forest at a little village called St. Sauveur, at 
nightfall, and in the morning we entered one of the straight, deep 
defiles of the ancient and wonderful forest of Compiegne. When I 
would think of any vastness achieved by nature and artifice com- 
bined, I recall the long, canopied continuity of shade through which 
we made this day's journey. Here is a solid forest, fifty miles in 
circumference, patrolled, and guarded, and worked by eight hundred 
men, producing every year seven hundred thousand francs' worth of 
wood, and three hundred thousand in game. It is traversed by three 
hundred and sixty roads, meeting at two hundred and ninety oarre- 
fours, all arranged in such superb geometry, that from each carrefour 
you can see clown straight lines of verdure, in from eight to twenty- 
four directions, and from horizon to horizon. Twenty-seven brooks 
wind through this wonderful forest ; sixteen lakes glass it ; nine vil- 



NAPOLEON III. AND NAPOLEONISM. 525 

lages are pent up in its perpetual shadows ; fourteen hunting-lodges 
stand by its waysides, where all the night the baying of hounds 
startles the lonely traveller ; two ranges of not inconsiderable moun- 
tains, curtained with foliage, shut in most of its area ; the ruins of 
eleven castles and abbeys are buried in its fastnesses or crown its 
steeps ; a real Roman road, with Roman villages disentombed beside 
it, passes through its largest diameter ; and where its mighty oaks, 
and elms, and beeches, and maples darken and murmur now, there 
have their ancestors held this realm for all the Christian era. It is 
this that makes the Forest of Compiegne remarkable in France ; but, 
to me, the crowning wonder was the patient labor and embellishment 
which had softened such wild nature to its own conceit. Over every 
roadway the huge trees had been taught to arch in perfect aisles ; so 
that the whole seemed some Druidical Cathedral, where every open 
carrefour was a lantern, and whose choirs were the million birds 
that trilled all day, while at night the cuckoo shouted her stento- 
rian note, and the owl laughed like a maniac unchained. Still in 
these miles of lofty arbor the wild boar made his home unchallenged, 
save once a year, when the Emperor and his game-keepers come up 
to Compiegne with horn and rifle, and the w T oocls are filled with gal- 
loping courtiers. We walked among the hares and rabbits, and 
heard the whirr of pheasants, and now and then a fox stared down 
the long carpet of grass, amazed at the distinctness of the distance : 
but it is at bodily peril that you discharge a pistol, or stone a wren, 
or light a fire, or pluck a twig in this Imperial domain. The laws 
are w r ritten at every carrefour, where, also, index-boards relieve 3 T ou 
from the dread of wandering astray and purposeless, and while this 
vast shadow-land is clean and thrifty as a lady's lawn, yet you will 
roam for hours and hours and see no human face, nor hear the rever- 
berations of an axe. We call our western hemisphere a land of 
boundless forests ; but I have never found in it a roof of shade like 
this of Compiegne. Industry has reduced our woodland to " scrub ;" 
the " wilderness " of Virginia is chiefly brush-land, swamp and barren, 
and even in Michigan, the lumberman's State, it is rare to see a 
square mile of stalwart towering tree-boles. The Forest of Com- 
piegne is only sixty miles from Paris, and it is not so large as that of 
Fontainebleau, but for quality the aboriginal Indians might have 
been proud of it. 



526 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

In the middle of this deep forest at the little village of St. Jean 
au Bois, we found this sign set up against an inn : — 



THE DOCTOR LARREY, 

A FAMOUS AMERICAN DENTIST, 

Now making a tour of the 

DEPARTMENT OF THE SEINE AND OISE, 

will be here 

ON THURSDAY AND FRIDAY NEXT, 

and at 

PIERREFONDS FOR THE WEEK SUCCEEDING. 

M. Gardette, the Priest, and M. Bouille, the Aubergiste, 
are his references. 



Our little party, solemnized by our insignificance amid this vegeta- 
ble sea, came now and then to relics of a former era. At Charnplieu 
we found a Roman theatre in perfect restoration, guarded by an old 
veteran, who talked of Leipsic and Waterloo ; and near Fontenoy a 
score of laborers were working with pick and shovel in a Roman vil- 
lage to find material for Louis Napoleon's "Life of Caesar." For 
this book there must have been, at one time or another, ten thousand 
men employed. I saw about a regiment of them digging up the 
palace of the Caesars in Rome, and from Marseilles to Calais they 
unearthed every old coin, pot, and spear-head. At Pierrefonds we 
saw the most original and beautiful restoration in France, — the 
feudal castle of that name battered down by Richelieu's order, but 
the designs for which, being happily preserved, it had been rebuilt by 
the Emperor with all the massive elaborateness of its model, com- 
plete in buttress, battlement, postern, portcullis, donjon, chapel, and 
moat, so that if gunpowder could be abolished to-day, Pierrefonds 
would be less pregnable than Fort Richmond, or Drury's Bluff. Of 
this revived castle is to be made a mediaeval arsenal, bristling with 
armor, and lances, and axes ; and as we strangers gazed upon it in 
the sunset, sharply cut, machicolated, graceful, yet serene, we 
looked into each other's eyes. 





GREAT STATE CEREMONIES. 

1 — The Fete at Venice. 2— The Tope Blessing on Christmas-Day. 3 — Coronation 

of the Queen of England, 



NAPOLEON III. AND NAPOLEONISM. 527 

There were but twelve thousand souls resident in the town of 
Compiegne, but it had a historical reminiscence for every man. By 
the aid of Lambert de Baltyhier, conscientious antiquarian, we made 
every dumb wall speak. Here were wide convents used for no better 
purpose than storing pork and flour, groined cloisters for horse-stalls, 
and ruined abbeys in the midst of the town eaten by ivy. Standing 
by the river's side, haunted by pigeons, is the very tower Whose 
draw-bridge, raised by treachery, gave the Maid of Arc to Burgundy 
and Britain. She said her last prayer in liberty here, in the church 
of St. Jacques, and on the bare heights across the Oise the besieging 
armies pitched their tents. In this chateau lived the son of Charle- 
magne, whose father gave him the world, but whose feeble hands 
could not retain it. Beyond the village, at Choisy lay the body of 
the wife of Pepin, and at Villers Cotterets, not far away, Dumas, the 
novelist, was born. The forest, whose black edges made night per- 
petual on our east, had been the seat of desperate robbers, hedged in 
castleholds whose memory lived in every peasant's fears. Here, by 
Compiegne, Bonaparte received Marie Louise, pouring the perjury of 
love into her ear ; and once in twelve months the dissolute and var- 
nished court of the present adventurer congregates here to hear lewd 
plays, and to coquette in the forests. There is a museum in the old 
Hotel cle Ville, filled with the relics of this region, and every Sunday 
the military band gives practice in the chateau gardens. 

Ensconced in the deep forest with our pipes and books, we might 
lie all day, approached by none save perhaps a strolling wood-cutter, 
or a woman beating her panniered donkey. Still, the strong call of 
the cuckoo drove away all this, and the herds of deer came upon us 
unaware, and gazed and burst into the covert. The violets soon 
began to weave devices in the moss, and buttercups came, as at home, 
to look for tardy summer ; then there were stawberries on the knolls, 
and so, pace by pace, the warm weather fell upon Compiegne, and 
brought upon us the noisy and imperious court. 



■f : i 

M 



CpiPTER XX. 

- £* ^Bffill FRENCH GOVERNMENT. 

A comparison q£ bereaucracy under the empire with simple Jeffersonian administration in 
America. — - The legislature, the ministry, and the departments. 

In Jf-ance, and upon the continent of Europe, which, willingly or 
unwillingly, looks to France for example, we shall find an innumera- 
Jbljf number of officials, infinite jurisdiction, the pomp of government, 
and ubiquitous uniforms, so that it is almost as impossible to get out 
of government as to get out of nature there ; at the birth-couch the 
Emperor's officer steps in to enrol the name of the child for the con- 
scription, and a certificate of birth or paper " de naissance " must bo 
carried upon the person perpetually by every French man and French 
woman ; at the grave the government is near by to prescribe the cost 
of the funeral, and unwilling to release its hold even upon the carcass 
of the subject. 

The first great distinction between France and the United States, in 
the mind being that one is a personal, and the other a popular gov- 
ernment, the more visible distinction is that France is a bureaucratic 
government, and the United States is merely a constrained federal 
administration, omitting to take cognizance of any matters save those 
which affect its own dignity and permanence, and leaving to the 
people, in their local and individual way, to carry out their own 
fortunes and the destinies of the state. 

Bureaucracy is derived from the French word bureau, a writing- 
desk or a business office, and signifies that kind of government where 
a host of officials, responsible only to their respective chiefs, interfere 
with, and control, every detail of public and private life. In France, 
bureaucracy is the distinguishing feature of the government, and 
also in the German States, where critics call it vielregieren, or much 
government. There is little bureaucracy in the United States ; for 
Jefferson overthrew it in his simple definition of free government, 
notwithstanding which, the motto of the " Congressional Globe" to 
the present day is, " We are governed too much." 

528 



THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT. 529 

An American visiting France is apt to fall in love with the admira- 
ble system of protection afforded there, the regulation of monopolies 
by government, the safety of the person, the splendor and dimen- 
sions of the national enterprises, the civility and the rich costumes 
of the police, the railroad guards, the firemen and the merchant 
captains, and he insensibly thinks of the coarse equality of subordi- 
nates at home, the brusqueness of officials, the unrestrainable avarice 
of corporations, the facility for contriving monopolies, the cheapness 
of life, and the petty penalty for violence against the person. But 
the observing man, looking beneath society, and above his own tran- 
sient convenience, will ascribe to bureaucracy all the misfortunes of 
France since the downfall of the first Napoleon. That sleepless 
and versatile suggester covered France with administration, and 
gathered into his imperial hand the skeins of the largest and the least 
of his infinite establishments. He accustomed every Frenchman to 
look to the government for relief in every inconvenience, and at 
every time of deprivation. He took from the people the conscious- 
ness and the necessity of individual exertion, and he put a bureau 
at every elbow, and an official in it, to anticipate the wishes of his 
subjects ; the consequence is, that the individual character of French- 
men is almost extinct, and they are unstable as petted children. 
Having several times conquered opportunities for free government, 
and being in large majorit}^ sincere wishers for a Republic, they fasten 
upon the Republic, when they get it, the whole burden of their necessi- 
ties, stifle it with bureaux, and make it ridiculous by compelling it to 
be the vehicle of their dreams and experiments. A Republic that 
shall keep bread cheap, hold corn in " Warehouses of Abundance," 
and support " National Workshops," is bound to become the victim 
of its magnanimity, to arouse expectations that cannot but be disap- 
pointed, and to disappear at last under the anarchy of its upbraiders. 
The founder, expositor, and administrator of that restricted Repub- 
licanism which alone is durable, Thomas Jefferson, taught the 
American people that the best government is that which is least seen, 
and, adopting his sentiments, the American people have become the 
most self-reliant, adventurous, and enterprising people on the globe. 
Always out of sight of their government, yet finding it strong when 
there is real necessity, they have fewer officials and smaller expenses 
than any great nation, and are a rebuke to bureaucratic despotism, 
which, except in England, characterizes the whole of Europe. 

In all France there are five hundred and thirty-four thousand eight 
67 



530 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

hundred office-holders, exclusive of servants, counting neither the 
Army nor the Navy ; the salaries of the clerks at the departments in 
Paris alone amount to one million three hundred thousand dollars a 
year. The Emperor's household consists of an immense number of 
officials, amongst whom are twent3 r -five physicians and surgeons, 
sixteen aides-de-camp, and eight chaplains and ecclesiastics ; the 
Empress has a lady reader, and the Emperor's son has three tutors. 
The Minister of State is also the patron of letters, theatres, and 
science. All the monuments, museums, palaces, and schools of fine 
arts, are controlled by the Minister of the Imperial household. The 
Emperor's body-guard consists of two hundred and twent\ T -two 
mounted men, gorgeousty apparelled ; the Empress has also her own 
escort, and the Imperial Guard consists of eight regiments of 
infantry, six of cavalry, two of Gendarmes and Chasseurs, and six- 
teen batteries of artillery. There is no such array of gorgeous 
official costumes in England as we find in France, where it is a stated 
belief that fine uniforms give dignity and effect to authority, — a 
statement disputed by a French traveller in America : — 

" I am inclined to believe that the influence which costumes really 
exercise, in an age like that in which we live, has been a good deal 
exaggerated. I never perceived that a public officer in America was 
the less respected whilst he was in the discharge of his duties, 
because his own merit was set off by no adventitious signs." 

We are getting out of our attachment to non-uniformed officials 
since Mr. James Fisk, the steamboat " Admiral," and the "Imperi- 
alist " newspaper have developed amongst us ; but it is remarkable that 
with more uniforms we have less respect for our officials than we 
used to have when they wore plain citizen dress. 

The possession of office in France, as in most of the monarchies in 
Europe, is considered somewhat of an aristocratic distinction, and 
hence De Tocqueville says : — 

"I look upon the entire absence of gratuitous functionaries in 
America as one of the most prominent signs of the absolute dominion 
which democracy exercises in that country. All public services, of 
whatsoever nature they may be, are paid ; so that every one has not 
merely a right, but also the means of performing it." 

If De Tocqueville lived in our time he would see that many of our 
officials are so indifferently paid that they are, in all but name, 
reduced to the means of gratuitous functionaries, while they achieve 
no corresponding distinction. 



THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT. 531 

France is at present undergoing a radical change of government ; 
but the reforms proposed by the Emperor have not, at this writing, 
gone into effect, and, judging by the inconstant and despotic course 
of Napoleon, there is less probability of their continuing, than of 
his whole government being swept away by some attempt that he 
may make to resume his autocratic authority. We are assured, 
however, that they are to consist of self-government by the two 
legislative bodies ; the selection of a ministry from the two chambers ; 
more independence in proposing amendments to laws ; the right of 
interpellation, and of voting the yearly budget in detail ; open sessions 
of the Senate except by its own wish to the contrary ; the right of 
legislators to address questions to the government as in England, and 
co-operation of the corps legislatif with the Emperor in initiating 
new laws. These reforms will bring the government very nearly to 
the condition in which it stood under Louis Philippe, and will reduce 
the Emperor almost to a limited sovereign. When this programme 
shall be carried out, as it doubtless will be before this book goes to 
press, France will compare with America, as De Tocqueville drew 
the distinctions thirty years ago in the following six paragraphs : — 

" The sovereignty of the United States is shared between the 
Union and the States, whilst in France it is undivided and compact ; 
hence arises the first and the most notable difference which exists 
between the President of the United States and the King of France. 
In the United States the executive power is as limited and partial as 
the sovereignty of the Union in whose name it acts ; in France it is 
as universal as the authority of the state. The Americans have a 
federal, and the French a national government. 

" Sovereignty may be defined to be the right of making laws ; in 
France the King really exercises a portion of the sovereign power, 
since the laws have no weight till he has given his assent to them ; 
he is, moreover, the executor of all they ordain. The President is 
also the executor of the laws, but he does not really co-operate in 
their formation, since the refusal of his assent does not annul them. 

"But not only does the King of France exercise a portion of the 
sovereign power ; he also contributes to the nomination of the Legis- 
lature, which exercises the other portion. He has the privilege of 
appointing the members of one chamber, and of dissolving the other 
at his pleasure ; whereas the President of the United States has no 
share in the formation of the Legislative body, and cannot dissolve 
any part of it. The King has the same right of bringing forward 



532 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

measures as the chambers, — a right which the President does not 
possess. The King is represented in each Assembly by his ministers, 
who explain his intention, support his opinions, and maintain the 
principles of the government. The President and his ministers are 
alike excluded from Congress ; so that his influence and his opinions 
can only penetrate indirectly into that great body. The King of 
France is, therefore, on an equal footing with the Legislature, which 
can no more act without him than he can without it. The President 
exercises an authority depending upon that of the Legislature. 

" The President of the United States is a magistrate elected for 
four years. The King of France is an hereditary sovereign. In the 
exercise of the executive power the President of the United States is 
constantly subject to a jealous scrutiny. He may make, but he 
cannot conclude, a treaty ; he may designate, but he cannot appoint, 
a public officer. The King of France is absolute within the limits of 
his authority. The President of the United States is responsible for 
his actions; but the person of the King is declared inviolable by the 
French charter. 

"The King's government in France penetrates in a thousand 
different ways into the administration of private interests. Amongst 
the examples of this influence may be quoted that which results from 
the great number of public functionaries, who all derive their 
appointments from the government. This number now (1837) 
exceeds all previous limits ; it amounts to one hundred and thirty- 
eight thousand nominations, each of which may be considered as an 
element of power. The President of the United States has not the 
exclusive right of making any public appointments, and their whole 
number scarcely exceeds twelve thousand." 

In this chapter we are to consider the French administration as it 
has existed for nineteen years, and as much of it will continue to 
exist, notwithstanding any modifications which may be adopted. 

The Constitution of France bears the date of 1852, and was 
" decreed" by Louis Napoleon, in virtue of the powers delegated to 
him b} r the French people. There are five powers in the state : the 
Executive; the Ministers, whom he solely nominates; his Council of 
Stale, preparing laws under the direction of himself and ministers ; 
a Legislative Body, and a Senate. The government in its general 
working is one of the most arbitary and despotic in the world, but at 
the present writing the Emperor has made another of his frequent 
promises of reform ; for, by the elections of 1867, it was evident that 



THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT. 533 

a tremendous reaction had commenced against his government, — the 
harbinger of an oft-postponed revolution. 

By the Constitution of 1852, the Emperor is irresponsible ; his 
person is inviolable ; he has the right to pardon criminals ; to make 
treaties, and to confer honors and dignities ; he has the sole initiative 
in legislation ; he commands the Army and Navy ; no law is valid 
unless sanctioned by him; no person can hold any office without 
taking the oath of fidelity to him ; and he nominates to all charges, 
appointments, and offices, whatsoever. 

The Emperor's ministers receive twenty thousand dollars a 3 r ear, 
and are eleven in number, as follows : — 

Minister of State (Premier) ; Minister of Justice and Keeper of 
the Great Seal ; Minister of Finance ; Minister of the Imperial 
House ; President of the Council of State ; Minister of War ; Min- 
ister of Marine and Colonies ; Minister of Foreign Affairs ; Minister 
of the Interior ; and Minister of Agriculture, Commerce, and Pub- 
lic Works. The Minister of State is the medium of communication 
between the Emperor and the other ministers, as also with the 
Council of State, the Senate, and the Legislative Body ; he has, besides 
exclusive direction of the official newspaper, which is called the 
"Moniteur." These ministers are responsible to the nation, but only 
for their individual acts, and the Senate is the only body which can 
accuse them, — the Senate itself being, like themselves, the creature 
of the Emperor. In the Council of State there are about fifty mem- 
bers, each with a salary of five thousand dollars. These Councillors 
prepare projects of law, to be laid before the Legislative Body. 

The French Senate is composed of the Cardinals, Marshals, and 
Admirals of the realm, and, besides, of a number of other members 
nominated by the Emperor. Every Senator holds for life, unless he 
resigns, and his salary is six thousand dollars a year. The Senate 
is a more powerful body than the Corps Legislatif, which is precisely 
contrary to the condition of things in all constitutional govern- 
ments, as in England and the United States. The object of the 
Emperor in the composition of his Senate seems to have been to 
place all apparent legislation in the hands of his favorites, and leave 
the people little to do except to vote for representatives, who are 
themselves powerless. The Senate is the only body that can receive 
petitions, or change the fundamental law, and no vote of the Legisla- 
tive Assembly is effective without the Senate's sanction. The Empe- 
ror nominates the President and Vice-President of the Senate, each 



534 THE NEW AYORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

for the period of one year. They are charged especially to oppose 
all laws contrary to freedom of conscience, to the constitution, 
religion, and the equality of citizens before the law. 

The members of the Legislative Body are elected by universal 
suffrage ; there are upwards of ten millions of voters in France, 
about three-fourths of whom appear at elections. Every member 
sits six years, and receives an annual salary of five hundred dollars ; 
if five members request it, the public may be excluded ; and thus it is 
in the power of the Emperor to keep all obnoxious proceedings 
silent, for he is also the custodian of the public press ; besides, he 
nominates the President and Vice-President of the lower house, and 
they keep such order as he wishes, ruling down, and ruling out, and 
menacing members, and having large garrisons of troops at their 
command, within a few yards of the legislative palace. It is thus 
apparent that the government of France is merely an Emperor and 
a series of ceremonies. There is an abundance of voting, but little 
fair representation, and the only privilege of the people is revolution, 
unless the Emperor occasionally should agree, of his own pleasure, 
to loosen the cords of his despotism. Nevertheless, immense inter- 
est is taken by Frenchmen in their elections, and, under the menace 
of the Emperor, a splendid galaxy of opposition orators has arisen 
in the lower house. 

To ascertain the popularity of some of the leading governments 
of the world, we subjoin an account of the number of represent- 
atives in the lower and the upper house (1867), and the number of 
people to one representative, in the popular branch of the Legisla- 
ture. 

Lower Bouse. Upper House. J^L 

United States, 241 68 124,000 

Great Britain and Ireland, . . .658 462 45,000 

France, « . . 376 169 100,000 

Brazil, 122 60 62,000 

Canada, 181 78 2,000 

Switzerland, 128 44 20,000 

Chili, 98 20 20,000 

Prussia, 432 255 52,000 

Spain, 350 396 35,000 

Italy, 493 283 40,000 

Austria, 203 122 98,000 

Belgium, 116 58 42,000 

North German Confederation, . . 280 43 100,000 

Sweden, 185 119 22,000 



59 


14,000 


89 


51,000 


.15 


28,000 



THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT. 535 

Lower House. Upper House. Population to 

each Representative. 

Denmark, 101 

Holland, 72 

Portugal, 154 

The upper house of the Legislature, or Senate, consists of life 
members appointed by the Emperor. He appoints his Ministers 
without consultation, and the principle of the responsibility of the 
Ministers to the Corps Legislatif, though strongly demanded by 
Thiers and others, is denied by the constitution. It is only the 
bourgeoises or manufacturing, mechanical, and mercantile classes of 
the cities and towns, amongst whom a liberal party can be formed. 
Even upon these, the Emperor can bring to bear an enormous power 
of corruption and intimidation. " We can best conceive its extent," 
says the " New York Tribune," " by imagining a President of the 
United States to have so changed the constitution that he could only 
be resisted by revolution ; who called upon the people once in six 
years to vote for him, or for chaos; who wielded a power of patron- 
age corresponding, not merely to that of our National Government, 
but of our States, counties, and cities as well ; who controlled the 
army, the police, the courts, the press, the clergy, and the schools ; 
who made every official a spy on every other, and on the people ; who 
suspended newspapers at pleasure, and suppressed public meetings 
at will ; and, finally, who limited the National Legislature to simply 
advising w T hat should, or should not, be done, without aspiring to 
criticise the constitution (which is the Emperor), on pain of treason. 
Such is to-day the consolidated despotism of France, — one of the 
most absolute the world has ever known." 

This despotism is more thorough in that there is no nobility, worthy 
the name, associated with it ; the aristocracy of the kingdom at the 
revolution, and their descendants, retain their titles by courtesy only. 

There is no capitol building, distinctively so called, in Paris ; the 
Senate meets in the Palace of the Luxembourg, and the public is not 
admitted to witness its deliberations, while the Representatives meet 
in a separate palace, more than half a mile distant ; these two 
palaces are on the unpopular side of the River Seine, and when the 
Emperor opens the two houses, he does not visit their chamber, like 
the Queen of England, but they are obliged to come to his Palace of 
the New Louvre, w T here, sitting upon his throne in gorgeous ceremony, 
he hears the newly elected members advance and take the oath before 



536 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

him. As in England, each Legislative Body subsequently discusses, 
and votes an address in reply. The debates in both houses are 
reported by stenographers, but the daily newspapers can only take 
the official reports, and publish them in extenso, or if any particular 
subject is discussed, they must print the whole of what is said about 
it, so that the Emperor shall have the last word. The legislative 
body, or lower house, is divided by lots into nine bureaux, or commit- 
tees, each of which elects its own President and Secretary. To get 
an amendment to any bill proposed from the Council of State, the 
Legislative Body must send three of its members to the palace, to 
plead their amendments before the Council of State. 

The palace of the Legislative Body was begun a. d., 1722, and 
partly built by Mansard, for the Dukes of Bourbon ; it was bought 
for one million one hundred thousand dollars forty years ago, and is 
an imposing structure on the banks of the Seine, facing, with its 
Corinthian portico, a bridge, which crosses to the front of the 
Emperor's Palace Gardens, — the site of the revolutionary guillotine. 
Without, are statues of Sully, Colbert, and other statesmen ; within 
are several large apartments ; and in the various salons are busts, 
statues, reliefs, and paintings emblematic of the growth of French 
law and civilization. The Legislative Hall, which corresponds to our 
old Hall of Representatives, is ornamented with twenty-four marble 
columns, and has five hundred seats, rising in tiers, from the Presi- 
dent's chair ; the walls and ceiling are decorated in crimson velvet and 
gold ; there are galleries and tribunes for the diplomatic body, the 
imperial family, and the officers of state ; a libraiy of sixty-five 
thousand volumes is connected with the building, and near by the 
President of the body has a palace. 

While the Legislative Chamber is ostensibly open to the public, 
little accommodation is really afforded the people. The deputies are 
allowed two tickets per day, which they sell to parties who resell them 
through their agents. The seats for spectators will not accommodate 
nearly the number which would be present, if the daily allowance of 
tickets were represented by their holders at one time. There are two 
hundred and ninety-two members in all, and two small galleries will 
fall far short of accommodating twice that number. Therefore it is 
that there is a great rush of spectators to be present at one o'clock 
precisely, when the doors are opened, and generally many ticket- 
holders have to go away without entrance for want of room for 
them. " If you cross the bridge in front of the palace at one 



THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT. 537 

o'clock p. M., each day," says a writer in the " Hartford Post," " you 
will be importuned by several persons who want to sell you tickets 
(or ' Billets pour la Seance du Corps Legislatiff as they sa} T ) ; and I 
understand they have sometimes got as high as eighty francs (six- 
teen dollars) for each of them. 

" The President, Mr. Schneider (1869), a little, old, but good-look- 
ing, white-haired Frenchman, with a German name, generally springs 
a stationary silver bell, when he calls the members to order ; if that 
is not sufficient he raps upon the desk, and he had occasion to do so 
quite often, the aforesaid armed men calling out, or ejaculating some- 
thing I did not distinctly hear, but which the members seemed to. In 
front of the President's desk is the ' Tribune,' or platform, on which 
some of the orators take their stand when they address the audience. 
On each side, and in front of the Tribune, are the desks of the steno- 
graphic reporters, etc. The President wears a red scarf over his right 
shoulder, extending below the waist on the left side. Of the officers 
dressed in black broadcloth, with ' swallow-tailed ' coats, and white 
cravats, and carrying a sword, I counted twelve. Besides these were 
quite a number of messengers or pages, dressed in a uniform of red 
and blue, with trimmings of gilded lace." 

The French Senate meets in the old Palace of the Luxembourg, in 
the midst of the Students' Quarter near the university. It was built 
two hundred and fifty years ago. The French Senate, in 1847, con- 
sisted of three hundred and five peers. Behind the palace are large 
gardens, and within it is a spacious court ; the building is surmounted 
with Mansard roofs and pavilions, and a part of it is occupied by 
magnificent state apartments, and a superb picture-gallery ; here 
Napoleon was divorced from Josephine ; in the Gardens, Marshal 
Ney was shot. The Senate Chamber is semi-circular, vaulted, ninety- 
two feet in diameter, and the ceiling, supported by columns, is richly 
painted ; in a recess are the elevated seats of the President and 
Secretaries, flanked by statues of monarchs, priests, and politicians ; 
there are one hundred and sixty-five seats for Senators, besides seats 
for the Emperor's Ministers, near the President's chair ; the library 
here consists of forty thousand volumes. 

While there is a nominal aristocracy in France, and many of the 
Admirals, Marshals, and other officials have titles, aristocratic distinc- 
tions are really swept away, save in so far as to make the semblance 
of a court. A vast order of knighthood is the Legion of Honor, 
where ribbons are much coveted by American piano-makers, and the 



538 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

venders of sewing-machines. The most formidable question in " the 
trade " of recent days has been whether Chickering had more ribbon 
than Steinway, and in the discussion of it the subject of red tape 
was almost completely neglected. 

The Legion of Honor, of France, is presided over by thr ; : Emperor, 
as Grand Master, but is administered by a Grand Chancellor and 
Council ; it pa}-s pensions to officers and soldiers of distinction, and 
its members number about fifty-seven thousand, divided into five 
orders, each privileged to wear a ribbon, cross, or other decoration. 
No French subject is allow r ed to wear a foreign decoration without 
government authority. 

In the payment of pensions and salaries in France, and all Euro- 
pean States, the tendency is toward extravagant sums in high places, 
and parsimony toward the lower office-holders ; while the reverse is 
the case here, as De Tocqueville exemplified many years ago, when he 
said : — 

" It must, however, be allowed, that a democratic state is most 
parsimonious toward its principal agents. In America, the second- 
ary officers are much better paid, and the dignitaries of the adminis- 
tration much worse, than they are elsewhere." He gave this example 
to bear out his statement : — 

United States. 

Treasury Department. 

Messenger, $700 

Clerk with lowest salary, 1,000 

Clerk with highest salary, 1,735 

Chief Clerk, ' . . 2,000 

Secretary of State, . . 6,000 

The President (Andrew Jackson), 25,000 

France. 

Ministere de Finances, 

Huissier, 1,500 fr. 

Clerk with lowest salary, 1,000 to 1,800 fr. 

Clerk with highest salary, 3,200 to 3, GOO fr. 

Secretaire-general, 20,000 fr. 

The Minister, 80,000 fr. 

The King (Louis Philippe), 12,000,000 fr. 

We shall now proceed to examine some of the departments and 
bureaux of the French Government. 



THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT. 539 

It is the pride of the French Government, above that of every other 
nation of Europe, that it is the most thorough encourager of educa- 
tion, of art, and of literature. It is with education alone that we 
are mainly concerned in America, having but recentty created a 
bureau in the interest of the same, at Washington ; but this is 
simply a bureau of inquiry, of suggestion, and of statistics, while 
in France the central government is the Director-General of all 
education within the empire, and has organized it upon the mathe- 
matical principles of its army and its police. Napoleon I. estab- 
lished one Imperial University, consisting of all the academies in 
France, and in 1852 the present Emperor restored this system ; so 
that at present there are sixteen academies, of which Paris is the 
central and eminent one. When we speak of the University of 
Paris, therefore, we mean only the Academy of Paris, a component 
part of the grand National University ; this and all the other schools 
of France are subordinate to the Minister of Public Instruction, 
whose council is impartially composed of five Catholic ecclesiastics, 
one minister of the Lutheran, one of the Calvinistic, and one of the 
Jewish creed, three Senators, three Councillors of the State, three 
members of the Court of Cassation, five members of the Institute 
of France, two heads of private schools, and eight Inspectors- 
General, all appointed by the Emperor for one year. Each of the 
sixteen universities of France has, subordinate to it, lyceums 
(grammar schools), colleges, and primary schools. Every university 
has faculties, either of medicine, law, literature, or sciences ; for 
example, there are six faculties of Catholic theology, and two of 
Protestant theology, nine faculties of law, three of medicine, and 
six of science and letters ; each of these, except Protestant theology, 
is maintained in the Academy of Paris. The Acadenry of Paris is 
situated in a series of buildings, scattered through what is called 
the Latin Quarter of the cit} r , chief of which is the Sorbonne, called 
for a gentleman of that name, wdio founded a school there six hun- 
dred years ago. The present Sorbonne building was erected by Riche- 
lieu, the great Prime Minister ; it is a vast, dingy building, enclosing 
wide courts, including a fine church, and owning a library of eighty 
thousand volumes. Richelieu is buried in the chapel. At the Sorbonne 
the faculties of science, letters, and theology lecture. The celebrated 
colleges of medicine and law are close by the Sorbonne; in the latter 
there are eighteen professors, and two thousand students ; in the 
former fifty-seven professors and tutors, and three thousand students. 



540 THE NEW WOULD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

Many medical students go from the United States to Paris, and the 
total cost of their tuition for four years is two hundred and fifty-five 
dollars. The College of Medicine is the most celebrated school of 
its kind in the world, having adjunct to it magnificent dissecting- 
rooms and vast hospitals ; there are twenty-eight thousand plrysicians 
and apothecaries in France ; of the Paris hospitals the Hotel Dieu 
contains eight hundred and twenty-eight beds, and twelve thousand 
patients annually, attended by thirty-three Augustinian nuns. A 
separate chapter might be made upon the hospitals of Paris alone. 
They comprise hospitals for foundlings, schools for mid wives, clois- 
ters for sick children, soup-houses, and nurseries, where poor working- 
women deposit their babies in the morning, return to suckle them at 
the proper hours, and take them home in the evening, paying four 
cents a day. 

The charities of Paris, and of France generally, are remarkably 
original and efficient ; many of the almshouses are organized upon 
plans which might well be imitated in America, and the whole system 
of public and private schools is worthy the attention of enlightened 
humanity. The schools of Paris and France are the perfection of 
human encouragement ; one of the grammar schools has forty-two 
professors, three hundred and seventy boarders, and five hundred day 
scholars ; equally large are some of the private schools, one of which 
— the College Stanislas — has one hundred and thirty professors, 
and twelve hundred boarders and day scholars. There are also many 
free schools, many schools which give valuable prizes to pupils, 
schools of music, declamation, commerce, design, night schools, and 
adult schools. Prize students at the Fine Arts College are sent to 
Rome to study at the expense of the state. There is a special school 
to encourage the study of ancient manuscripts in the libraries ; of 
military and staff schools, there are many extraordinary ones, par- 
ticularly the Polytechnic School, where two hundred and sixty pupils 
have the advantage of twenty professors, and pay each but two hun- 
dred dollars a year ; besides all these, the libraries, museums, and 
collections of Paris are interesting in the highest degree ; the whole 
city, indeed, is a prodigious university, where learning and talent 
receive higher rewards than anywhere upon earth; so that, in our 
da} T , France stands at the head of nations in the arts, literature, and 
oratory. The highest prizes in the Paris lyceums, in the } r ear 1866, 
w r ere taken by the Masters Beck with, two American lads. At the pin- 
nacle of the entire intellectual fabric stands the Institute of France, 



THE TRENCH GOVERNMENT. 541 

founded in the period of the Republic, a. d., 1795, and composed of 
two hundred and twenty-three members, two hundred and twenty-five 
correspondents, thirty-one associates, thirty-five free academicians 
and seven secretaries ; these are divided into five academies, each of 
which gives annual prizes, and one of them is specialty charged with 
the composition of the French Dictionary, and with the extension and 
purification of the language. The Emperor labored long in vain to 
become a member of the Institute of France, while some of his most 
dignified enemies hold seats within its charmed circle. 

The only secret society in France, permitted by law, is that of the 
Free-Masons, which has five hundred lodges. 

Religion in France is neither free as in the United States, nor is 
there a State church, as in England, while the Emperor and his 
household, and most of the great officers of the State, are Catholics. 
All religious sects are tolerated and supported by government, and 
yet no congregation can meet, no church can change its pastor, 
except by government permission. The Protestant and the Jewish 
religions are both supported by law, and at least one of the Empe- 
ror's ministers (Durny) is a Protestant, but the Pope is bound by 
his agreement with the first Napoleon to relinquish the temporal 
power within France, and the Emperor nominates to all the dignities 
of the Papal Church. The Calvinist Protestant Church has one thou- 
sand and forty-five places of worship in France ; the Lutheran Church 
four hundred and three places of worship, and the Church of Eng- 
land about forty. There are alleged to be nearly thirty-six millions 
of Roman Catholics in France, but in this number all are counted 
who are not members of some other distinctive faith. A recent 
inquiry resulted in the conclusion, that of these more than twelve 
millions professed no faith whatever. The number of French 
Protestants is less than eight hundred thousand, and of Jews and 
other creeds one hundred and five thousand. The Catholic clergy 
comprise one hundred and twenty-four thousand, including fifty 
thousand monks, or nuns. The salary of the Catholic Archbishop 
of Paris is ten thousand dollars a year ; the whole cost of religious 
worship in France is under ten million of dollars annually. The most 
remarkable cathedrals on the American continent are probably those 
of Montreal, and the Roman Catholic Cathedral", of New York ; the 
latter (incomplete) is three hundred and thirty-two feet long, one 
hundred and seventy-four feet wide, and it is flanked by two towers, 
each three hundred and twenty-nine feet high ; it contains one bun- 



542 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

dred and three windows of stained glass, and it is built in the 
middle pointed Gothic style of the thirteenth century, of a beautiful 
crystalline white marble. 

Notre Dame, of Paris, is three hundred and ninety feet long, one 
hundred and forty-four feet wide, and its two towers are each two 
hundred and four feet high, while its spire is two hundred and eighty 
feet high ; it is in florid-pointed architecture, with flying buttresses, 
and will hold twenty-one thousand persons. The great cathedrals of 
Rouen, Chartres, Amiens, Rheims, and Strasbourg are far more florid 
and elaborate than the Gothic cathedrals of England ; they are 
exceeded in beauty only by the cathedrals of Cologne, Milan, and 
Brussels. 

Napoleon is a canon of the Lateran Church in Rome, as successor 
of the most Christian Kings. As such, he once sent twenty-five thou- 
sand francs to Rome ; Henri IV., and the following kings, up to Louis 
XIV., sent each four thousand louis d'or ; but Charles X. reduced 
the sum to twenty-five thousand francs. Louis Philippe declined the 
honor of the canonry. The garrison of Rome is mainly French, and 
Napoleon has been repeatedly blessed by the old bankrupt pon- 
tiff. 

There are fifteen Catholic Archbishops and sixty-nine Bishops in the 
empire, all of whom are nominated by the Emperor, and canonically 
inducted by the Pope ; six of these hold the rank of Cardinals in 
the Senate. When the French Revolution broke out, the Catholic 
Church in the kingdom had a revenue of seven hundred and fifty mil- 
lion livres, bat at present the state assumes the responsibility 
of maintaining worship, and it has appropriated to itself the revenues 
of the Church. 

There are few nobles in France under the empire, and they are 
mainly distinguished officers of the Army and Navy, and statesmen 
but recently promoted to honors. 

The office of the Secretary of Foreign Affairs of France is very 
elaborately organized : the commercial department alone has twenty- 
eight Consul Generals, eighty-seven Consuls, seven hundred and 
seventy-five Consular Agents. The Minister's Department, or Hotel, 
cost one million dollars, and it is situated in a narrow street of the 
old aristocratic quarter. France supports very expensive embassies at 
all the great capitals, her Ambassador at St. Petersburg receiving 
sixty thousand dollars a year ; at London, fifty-five thousand dollars ; 
at Rome, twenty-eight thousand dollars ; and at Rio de Janeiro, 



THE FRENCH GOVEKNMENT. 543 

Washington, and Mexico, seventeen thousand dollars each ; the Amer- 
ican Ministers at London and Paris receive about the latter figure. 

There are about eight thousand five hundred miles of railway in 
France, which pay five million dollars in taxes annually, and which 
have received one hundred and fifty million dollars from the govern- 
ment ; they carry one billion four hundred million passengers annu- 
ally, by means of seventy-two thousand trucks, carriages, and 
engines. A railway girdles Paris, which cost nearly four million five 
hundred thousand dollars. Government reserves the right to exer- 
cise espionage, inquiry, and at times arbitrary control, over all the 
private corporations in the empire ; the stage-coaches, called " dili- 
gences, " the hacks, the omnibuses, whatever undertakes in a corpo- 
rate capacity to minister to the uses of citizens, is brought under the 
strictest government control. There are thirty-one lines of omni- 
buses in Paris, controlled by a single company, whose charter expires 
in the } T ear a. d. 1910, and which has five hundred omnibuses, 
carrying eighty million passengers a year, for six cents each 
passenger, inside seats, and three cents outside. There is also a great 
hack company, which pays the city gf Paris four hundred thousand 
dollars a year ; the omnibus company pays the city two hundred 
thousand dollars annually for its monopoly. The French hacks were 
introduced into the United States in 1869, and also the English 
Hansom cab. There are one hundred and fourteen thousand horses 
in Paris, and more than sixty thousand vehicles ; yet eighty-seven 
years before the discovery of America there was not a carriage of 
any kind in France. There are about four thousand five hundred 
post-offices in France, with thirty thousand employes ; in all France 
there are about one thousand one hundred newspapers and periodi- 
cals, nearly six hundred of which are published in Paris. The receipts 
of the French post-office are about seventeen million dollars annu- 
ally. The money-order system of the French post-office passes 
the boundar}^ of France, and commutes with the post-offices of many 
other countries. There are sixty-two thousand five hundred miles of 
telegraphic line in France. A message sent from one quarter of Paris 
to another costs ten cents for twenty words. A telegraphic despatch 
from Baltimore to Washington, D. C, cost ten cents for ten words. 

The fortifications on the French frontier, mainly the work of Vau- 
ban, a Republican in a royal age, are among the strongest in the 
world. 

Louis Philippe fortified Paris at suggestion of Napoleon. The 



54A THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

fortifications cost twent3 r -eight million dollars, and are armed with 
nearly three thousand mortars, cannons, and howitzers, and two 
hundred thousand muskets. The garrison of Paris is never less than 
thirty thousand men, besides forty thousand National Guards, or 
Compulsory Militia, four thousand four hundred and forty one Gen- 
darmes, or Government Police, four thousand five hundred and ninety 
Municipal Police, and one thousand three hundred paid firemen, be- 
sides an unknown number of spies, secret agents, etc., etc. Some of 
the barracks of Paris are very beautiful ; one is seldom out of the 
sight of a soldier or out of the sound of a drum in France, in any hour 
of the year. 

The monetary system of France, and that of weights and measures, 
is one of the most thorough in the world ; for measures the spherical 
distance from the equator to the pole was taken and divided in ten 
million equal parts ; each part is called a metre; the square and cube 
of a metre were made the standards of surface, capacity, and solidity. 
The weight of a cube of distilled water at the temperature of 39.2° 
Fahrenheit, was made the unit of weight. A metre is about thirty-nine 
and one quarter inches, English measure. A hectare is about two and 
a half acres. A litre is about a pint and three quarters. A kilo- 
gramme is about two and one-fifth pounds. 

Paris is very indifferently lighted with gas, except on the public 
streets, where there are twenty-nine thousand gas-burners, owned by a 
company whose charter expires a.d. 1906. This gas is furnished to the 
city of Paris, and government of France, for three cents per cubic metre, 
but the cost to private individuals is six cents for the same quantity. 
This company pays forty thousand dollars a year to the city, and all 
its pipes and accessories revert to Paris on the expiration of its char- 
ter, the city paying for the same four hundred thousand dollars. 

In 1866, government extorted from the cit}' of Paris three million 
seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars ; the budget of the city itself 
balanced at nearly forty-four million dollars. Taxes are levied 
throughout France upon windows and furniture. The debt of the city 
is upwards of forty million dollars. Nearly eighteen million dollars 
are collected at the gates of Paris, by what is called the octroi. 
Every town in France pays a large part of its expenses by thus 
enclosing the town with toll-gates, and making the farmers pay as they 
enter. Paris, like Philadelphia and Boston, has gradually absorbed 
all the suburbs which lie within its fortifications. 

Three remarkable government factories in France are those for 



THE EKENCH GOVERNMENT. 545 

making experimental porcelain, gorgeous tapestry and carpets, and 
snuff and tobacco ; the latter is a government monopoly, and its 
sales amount to twenty-eight million dollars annually. 

Wine is also provided with a special market in Paris, and its sale 
put under government control. The wine crop of France is raised 
upon eight hundred thousand acres, and it is worth one hundred 
million dollars annually, out of which forty million dollars are taken 
by national and municipal taxes. 

It was only in 1863 that the government relinquished its control 
of the bakers, whom it formerly compelled to sell bread at its own 
appraisement. The "price of bread in Paris is about four cents a 
pound at present. 

In 1865 there were one hundred and thirty-three thousand two 
hundred and twelve persons pensioned by France, at an expense of 
nearly fifteen millions of dollars a year ; this alone represented a 
capital of nearly one billion five hundred million dollars. 

Like the American government, and unlike other governments of 
Europe, generally speaking, the French raise loans from the population 
at large, instead of from a few rich capitalists. The system has worked 
successfully. None of the greater governments of Europe pays as high 
rate of interest as does the United States. 

Some of the great stock enterprises of France are very remarkable. 

The Credit Foncier of Paris is a Stock Company, with a capital of 
forty millions of dollars, which lends money for first mortgages upon 
real estate, for not more than five per cent, a year. This mortgage 
must be extinguished by the borrower in payments of from one to two 
per cent, a year upon the sum he received. The company meantime 
issues bonds of twenty dollars and upwards to equal the amount of 
its loans ; if a mortgagor fails to pay up his annuities his property is 
liable to be sold at auction. The government owns ten millions of 
stock in this company, and the Emperor names its governor and two 
sub-governors ; there are besides fifteen directors. The Minister of 
Finance has authority over the company ; so that here, as almost every- 
where, the state regulates even the corporate financial transactions 
of the people. The main office of the company is in a fine building 
in Paris ; but it has branch offices in a majority of the departments. 

Another great French company is the Credit Mobilier, with a capital 
of twelve millions of dollars in one hundred and twenty thousand 
shares of one hundred dollars a share. It bids for government loans, 
69 



54:6 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

and is a mammoth stock-broking corporation, but it does not make 
bargains, either optional, or on time, like private brokers. 

A curious banking corporation in Paris, also under the control of 
the Minister of Finance, is the Comptoir National d'Escompte, with a 
capital of eight millions of dollars, and several branches. It discounts 
bills due at a hundred days, and bearing two endorsements, for France 
and for foreign parts due at sixty-five days. It receives deposits and 
pays two per cent, upon them, and discounts for goods deposited in 
government warehouses. It charges four per cent, for such dis- 
counts. 

An institution partly of banking and partty of beneficence is the 
Caisse des Betraites pour la Vieillesse, which keeps money for people 
against old age, giving them four and a half per cent, compound interest, 
and paying the full sum back at death to the depositor's heirs. After 
reaching fifty years, the depositor gets an annuity of not more than 
three hundred dollars a year The funds are invested in Rentes. 

At the head of this government insurance company is the Minister 
of Agriculture and Commerce. It generally has on hand about one 
million of dollars and upwards. 

The above concern is joined with two other semi-government offices, 
the Caisse d'Amortisements, which conducts the reduction of the 
national debt, and the Caisse des Depots et Consignations, which paj-s 
four and a half per cent., chiefly upon deposits by public functionaries, 
and people who have received legal awards or damages. This caisse, 
or office, generally has on hand from one to two millions of dollars. 
It also is combined with the government substitute-office, called the 
Dotation de VArmee, which receives annual subscriptions from young 
men who expect to be drafted, and pays three and a half per cent, 
upon deposits by soldiers and officers of the army. 

Four hundred and sixty dollars is the present price of a substitute. 

The great pawn-broking shop of Paris is a bureau under the 
Minister of the Interior and the Prefect of the Seine ; it is managed 
by a director, and a council of twelve persons, one of whom is the 
Prefect of Police ; it was founded during the American Revolution, for 
the benefit of the hospitals. 

It advances four-fifths upon the value of gold and silver articles, 
and two-thirds upon the value of all other articles. It has one great 
bureau and twenty-two smaller ones, besides agents in different 
quarters of the town. Three thousand articles are pledged every day, 
two thousand dollars being the largest sum loaned, and it charges 



THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT. 547 

about nine per cent. ; after fourteen months all unredeemed articles 
are sold. 

There are forty-five of these excellent institutions in the different 
cities of France. 

The total receipts in seven years, of the Dotation de l'Armee, 
ending in 1862, amounted to nearly ninety million dollars, so that 
the conscription itself is a profitable though cruel source of revenue. 

Even funerals are monopolized in Paris by a private company, 
which is obliged to pay government eighty-two and a half per cent, on 
the produce of funeral ornaments, and fifteen per cent, on articles 
furnished ; the cheapest funeral costs less than four dollars, including 
the religious ceremonies. 

Private slaughter-houses are prohibited in Paris, and vast govern- 
ment butcheries accommodate the butchers, and help the revenues of 
the state. 

The judicial system of France is little like our own. The Minister 
of Justice, one of the Emperor's Cabinet, is the supreme head of all 
the judicial courts, and of all public worship. The High Court of 
Justice judges without appeal, or remedy, all persons accused of con- 
spiracies against the Emperor, and the security of his state ; it has 
ten judges and four deputy judges, annually appointed by the 
Emperor, and divided into two chambers, one to prosecute, the other 
to give judgment, through a jury composed of thirty-six office- 
holders. 

The French Court of Cassation is ostensibly the highest court of 
appeal, but really it is a department of .government, to inspect the 
administration of justice in the other courts ; but when it annuls a 
decision of a lower court, the case is not then determined, but 
returns to another court of the latter class. Sixty advocates have 
the monopoly of practice before the Court of Cassation, which latter 
has a President, three Vice-Presidents, and forty-five Councillors : 
attached to it are an imperial prosecutor, with six general advocates, 
and other officers ; eleven judges present are necessary to confirm a 
judgment ; the members of this high tribunal wear a red gown, 
doubled with white fur, and a violet velvet cap. 

The next court in rank is the Court of Accounts, which has juris- 
diction of the accounts and expenses of the empire. 

There are twenty-seven Courts of Appeal in France, each composed 
of a First President, several Presidents, a number of high Councillors, 



548 THE NEW WOKLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

and various subordinate officers ; the Court of Assize is the only 
French court in which trial by jury prevails, and in which are tried 
all criminal cases excepting offences against the state ; the civil tri- 
bunals of France hear and determine about one hundred and fifty 
thousand lawsuits every year, and the criminal courts try about 
four thousand cases. 

In each department of France, — eighty-nine in number, — there is 
a Court of Original Jurisdiction ; that of the department of Paris is 
composed of one President, eight Vice-Presidents, fifty-five Judges, 
twent}^four Procureurs, and forty -three Registrars ; this court decides, 
without appeal, actions relating to the person, or to personal prop- 
erty to the amount of three hundred dollars. 

A most extraordinary court is the Tribunal of Commerce, which 
exists in all large towns, and is composed of the heads of mercantile 
houses, elected for two years, at a meeting of influential merchants, 
a list of whom is drawn up by the Mayor (Prefect), and approved by 
the Minister of the Interior ; the object of these courts is to put com- 
mercial disputes and differences under the adjudication of the mer- 
chants themselves. The Tribunal of Commerce of Paris is com- 
posed of thirty Judges, and Deputy Judges, and a President ; attached 
to it are ten police officers, who arrest persons for debt. There are 
about one thousand five hundred stock companies formed every }^ear 
in Paris, and there are one thousand six hundred cases of bankruptcy 
within the same period. These latter matters come before the Tribu- 
nal of Commerce. There is one great police tribunal in Paris, cor- 
responding to our police courts ; there are twenty judges of the 
peace, one hundred and twenty-two notaries, eighty appraisers and 
auctioneers, who are exclusively government officers, one hundred 
and fifty sheriffs' officers (Huissiers), who protest bills, and a board 
of masters and foremen, called Prudliommes, who amicably settle 
disputes about wages, strikes, apprenticeships, etc., etc. 

There are nine hundred legal advocates in Paris, and upwards of 
two hundred solicitors and attorneys (avoues) ; the advocates have 
a bureau for gratuitous advice to the poor, open every Saturday. 
The Palace of Justice, which is to Paris what the Tombs Court is to 
New York, the great centre of police hearings and confinements, 
is a large building on an island in the Seine, where are also the 
police head-quarters of Paris. Very many courts, both high and low, 
and several prisons, cluster about this ancient pile, and here Marie 



THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT. 54-9 

Antoinette and the Gironclins were imprisoned. Across the way is the 
Tribunal of Commerce ; not far off is the Morgue, or dead-house. 
Sumptuous barracks and superb new architectures give dignity and ter- 
ror to this neighborhood of crime, destitution, and dispute, where 
have been enacted, through successive ages, the long drama of tyranny, 
torture, and despair, which makes so much of the literature of France. 
Near by is the Cathedral, and that Chapel, where are kept, according 
to the superstition, the very relics of the crucifixion of Christ. It is 
upon this spot, also, that the enthroned Master of France visits, 
through his satellites, the penalties of his vengeance upon the 
enemies of his dynasty ; for, as close by the Palace of Justice and the 
prisons stands the Hotel de Ville, or City Hall of Paris, the objective 
point of all popular uprisings, the capitol of the capital city, so 
Napoleon has chosen the favorite haunt of his enemies to keep his 
household of police agents, who are to feel in secret the pulse of Paris. 

Paris has two district administrations, like New York ; the Prefect 
of the Seine is the Mayor ; the Prefect of Police is the superintend- 
ent thereof, and he has charge of the eight prisons of Paris, and of all 
the spies, prostitutes, scavengers, firemen, policemen, bill-posters, 
vagrants, lotteries, gamblers, and whatever belongs to the political, 
sanitary, or criminal administration of the department. The Prefect 
of the Seine is the superintendent of all public works, establishments, 
churches, markets, hospitals, public festivals, etc., etc. ; under him 
are an immense number of officials. The annual jury list of the 
department of Paris contains two thousand jurors ; ecclesiastics, 
school-masters, domestics, workmen, and illiterate people are excluded 
from serving on juries. 

There are more than four hundred prisons in France, occupied by 
about seventy-one thousand people, and there is one convict station 
at Toulon. Oue great prison of Paris is modelled on the American 
solitary-cell plan. Condemned persons are publicly executed by the 
guillotine. Imprisonment for debt has been recently abolished in 
France. To take out any patent in France requires the payment of 
twenty dollars a year. Authors pay nothing for copyright. To 
carry a gun costs five dollars a year. 

Nothing would more astound an American in France than to ob- 
serve the singular administration of justice, wherein the judge brow- 
beats the witness, bullies and inveigles the prisoner, and uses every 
energy to make him convict himself. In all political trials, this is 
eminently the case, as witness the following scene : — 



550 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

Parisian Police Court. — A citizen is charged with having ex- 
cited the citizens to hate each other, etc., etc. Prisoner. I move 
that my trial be postponed. My lawyer is not ready. President. 
When will he be ready ? Prisoner. Perhaps in three or four years, 
Mr. President. (Great surprise on the bench, and laughter in the 
audience.) Prisoner. Let me explain ; I have confidence only in my 
young nephew, who has just commenced studying law. He needs 
time, but I tell you, Mr. President, he will make a first-rate lawyer. 

Another prisoner is accused of. having uttered seditious cries. 
President. Do you admit the charge? Prisoner. I had drunk a little 
too much last night. President. What did you shout? Prisoner. I 
shouted Vive la Republique ! President. Have you previously been 
condemned on the same charge ? Prisoner. Yes. President. When ? 
Prisoner. About eighteen years ago. President. What seditious 
cries did you utter at that time ? Prisoner. You must remember 
what it was, for you yourself sentenced me. President. What sedi- 
tious cries did you utter? Prisoner. Well, I shouted then Vive 
VEmpereur! (Loud laughter in the audience.) 

In like manner the police of Paris is protected in all its proceed- 
ings, requiring no warrant to enter any house, or search any bag- 
gage. To strike a French policeman is a high crime, but he has 
little responsibility, if he unjustly maltreats a citizen, or stranger, 
and during times of political excitement, the police and soldiery are 
encouraged to be merciless and aggressive, for the highest crime in 
France is to manifest ill-will to the imperial dynasty. Dr. Johnson, 
of Paris, a celebrated physician and journalist, gave an account, in a 
recent letter, of the treatment of an American, Mr. J. Q. A. Warren, 
of Boston, by the imperial police, during the election riots of 1869 : — 

" Mr. Warren was proceeding along the Boulevard Montmartre, in 
company with another American, when he saw the police chasing the 
crowd, and they turned into a side street, the Rue Richelieu, to get 
out of the way. They had not got far when they heard the beat of 
a drum. This was followed by a rush of police agents, and before 
they had time to remonstrate, or to state who they were, they were 
struck several times, and Mr. Warren was knocked down. His friend 
owed his exemption from further ill-usage and imprisonment, to the 
fact of his wearing the ribbon of the Legion of Honor ; but Mr. 
Warren, as he was trying to rise to his feet, was seized and dragged 
to the Mairie in the Rue Droupt. When he arrived there he found 
the large court-yard full of prisoners and policemen. After a delay 



THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT. 551 

of about half an hour, he was taken to the Inspector's room and 
searched. All his papers and money were taken from him. After 
his name, address, and signalement had been taken down, his papers, 
and, as he supposed, his money, were replaced in his pockets ; but he 
discovered subsequently that his funds had not been restored. A 
further examination was made of his person for weapons, after which 
he was transferred to another room, which was crowded with prison- 
ers of almost every station in life. After remaining there about 
half an hour, the prisoners were formed into a body, numbering 
about seven hundred, and marched, guarded by soldiers and police- 
men, to the Conciergerie prison at the other side of the river. 

"This was about one o'clock at night. During the march the 
utmost brutality was exercised toward the prisoners, and the} T were 
driven and pushed along like a herd of cattle. Mr. Warren was so 
badly bruised and hurt that he had to be supported by two of the pris- 
oners. His shirt and clothes were covered with blood from the effect 
of the blows which had been wantonly inflicted upon him in the yard 
of the Mairie, by one of the Sergeants de Yille. After they reached 
the Conciergerie^ about three in the morning, he fainted away, and was 
conveyed for the night to a separate cell, where he was attended by 
the surgeon of the prison, who administered chloroform and stimu- 
lants to him. He remained in the Conciergerie with the other pris- 
oners, until seven o'clock on Friday evening, and they had nothing 
all this time but a little soup of the weakest kind and some hard 
bread. As evening approached, they were* informed that they were 
about to be transferred to the fort at Bicetre, in the suburbs of 
Paris ; on learning which, Mr. Warren managed to get a scrap of 
paper, and wrote a letter to Dr. Johnson, informing him of his 
position. The doctor immediately forwarded it to Mr. Washburne, 
the American Minister, and at half-past twelve the same night, Mr. 
Frank Moore, Assistant Secretary to the Legation, went to the Prefec- 
ture, and demanded his release. He was told that it was then too 
late to do anything in the matter, but that it would be attended to 
early in the morning. 

"Shortly after he had despatched this note to Dr. Johnson, Mr. 
Warren and the other prisoners were transferred in the close prison 
carriages to the fort at Bicetre. They were kept standing in one of 
the casemates there, suffering from the heat and thirst consequent 
upon overcrowding, until nearly midnight. The roll was then called, 
and the prisoners were marched, eight at a time, accompanied by a file 



552 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

of soldiers, to the Inspector's room, in another building, where their 
names, addresses, and personal descriptions were entered in a book. 
This done, they were conveyed to a second casemate, and in proceed- 
ing to it each prisoner stopped by order, and picked up a bundle of 
straw, which, with a blanket, was to constitute his bed. There they 
were left in quietness for the rest of the night, but without food or 
drink. The heat and odor of the place were insufferable, and were 
aggravated by the fact that all the necessities of nature had to be 
provided for in that crowded apartment. To men accustomed to 
every luxury, as many of those confined there were, the sufferings 
endured during this memorable night must have been a terrible ordeal. 
It is stated that three of the prisoners died at the Conciergerie, while 
at Bicetre a fourth lost his senses, and committed suicide. 

" On Saturday noon an order reached the fort directing the release 
of Mr. Warren. He was summoned to the Directors' room, and the 
formality of entering in a book his name, personal description, and 
address in Paris, having been again gone through, he was told that he 
would be released the same evening. He was then taken back to the 
casemate, where he received a little food, and at six o'clock he was 
released and escorted to the railway by a corporal. Fortunately 
a little silver, sufficient to pay his fare, which he had in one of 
his pockets, had escaped or had not tempted the cupidity of his 
captors." 

These notes will convey some imperfect idea of the civil adminis- 
tration of France, a government which seeks to satisfy the wants of 
the people, by making them dependent upon it, and so robbing them 
of self-reliance and personal energy, so that they are but parts of its 
mighty machinery, whereof there is but one engineer, and he the sole 
hero of France, — Louis Napoleon, the wily egotist. 

The government is " an immense tutelary power," after the proph- 
ecy of De Tocqueville, " which takes upon itself alone to secure their 
gratifications, and to watch over their fate. 

" That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It 
would be like the authorit} r of a parent, if, like that authority, its ob- 
ject was to prepare men for manhood ; but it seeks, on the contrary, 
to keep them in perpetual childhood ; it is well content that the peo- 
ple should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. 
For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses 
to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness ; it pro- 



THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT. 553 

vides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facili- 
tates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their 
industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their 
inheritances. What remains, but to spare them all the care of think- 
ing, and all the trouble of living? 

" Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man 
less useful and less frequent ; it circumscribes the will within a nar- 
rower range, and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. 
The principle of equality has prepared men for these things ; it has 
predisposed men to endure them, and oftentimes to look on them as 
benefits. After having thus successively taken each member of the 
community in its powerful grasp, and fashioned him at will, the su- 
preme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It 
covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated 
rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds 
and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the 
crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and 
guided ; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly 
restrained from acting ; such a power does not destroy, but it pre- 
vents existence ; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, 
extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be 
nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which 
the government is the shepherd." 

This is the remarkable prophecy of a French author, who has been 
accused of rebuking republicanism, while he was really its most 
thoughtful and observing friend, and who lived down to Louis Na- 
poleon's coup d'etat, and died sorrowful because of it, and with sad 
contempt for its author. Let him be also the exponent of the chances 
of this violent dynasty for long life and for historic honor : — 

"Although this government has established itself by one of the 
greatest crimes recorded in histor} r , nevertheless it will last for some 
length of time, unless it precipitates itself to destruction. It will last 
till its excesses, its wars, its corruptions, have effaced in the public 
mind the dread of socialism, — a change requiring time. God grant 
that in the interval it may not end in a manner almost as prejudicial 
to us as to itself, — in some extravagant foreign enterprise. We know 
it but too well in France, — governments never escape the law of 
their origin. This government, which comes by the army, which can 
only last by the army, which traces back its popularity, and even its 
70 



554: THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

essence, to the recollections of military glory, — this government will 
be fatally impelled to seek for aggrandizement of territorj' and for 
exclusive influence abroad ; in other words, to war. That at last is 
what I fear, and what all reasonable men dread as I do. War would 
assuredly be its death ; but its death would perhaps cost dear." 



CHAPTER XXI. 

POLITICS AND POLITICIANS OF FRANCE AND THE CONTINENT. 

A sketch of the leading public men of France, and of the parties which they represent, with 
a brief statement of the present political issues of Europe at large. 

Europe may be compared to a crab, both in appearance and in 
sensibility ; all alive at a touch from without, yet within of feeble 
circulation, and at all points wearing the articulated armor of war. 
The most sensitive and mobile part of this irregular aggregation of 
unlike states is France, which is inhabited by the most democratic 
and courageous population of Europe, and which is accustomed to 
consider itself the leading state of civilization. In every political 
respect this assurance is well founded ; for there is but one state 
which can, by its own internal convulsions, make Europe rush to 
arms, and this is France. Prussia, Austria, and Italy may make war 
together ; tremendous mutiny may shake the British Empire in India ; 
Germany may move in solid body upon Denmark ; the Kaiser and 
the Czar may crush out the May gars, and Spain ma}^ expel its Queen, 
and still Europe will stay at home and read the tidings without 
anxiety ; but when Paris rises and France concurs, the European 
world feels sympathy, the people of every state start to arms, and 
the stock markets of Christendom are seized with panic. 

The cause of this is, that France is truly the state by which states- 
men steer ; it is not her rulers which men dread, but her people and 
her ideas ; and therefore the ruling and wealthy classes of neighbor- 
ing nations are always satisfied to see France securely folded in the 
arms of some despotism, whether this be the Bonapartes' or the 
Bourbons'. 

By a different process the people of the neighboring states are 
readity able to soothe themselves when some adventurer or some re- 
actionist seizes France ; the self-complacency and egotism of the 
French people is irritating to the Germans, their highly civilized 
neighbors, who are at heart as anxious for free institutions as the 
French, and by turning to account the national jealousy of their peo- 

555 



556 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

pie, the monarchs of France and Germany are able in the last resort 
to destroy sympathy between Saxon and Celtic republicans, and make 
them enemies instead of allies. With all this, the people who do not 
love the French, feel the contact, the magnetism, and the example of 
France, where there are politicians more than the equals of monarchs 
in organizing and in oratory, and where party spirit is not the blind 
rancor of traditional classes, as in England, but the intelligent appre- 
hension of men and issues. To us, in America, there is no politics 
in Germany ; we know nothing about it, nor about Austrian, Scandi- 
navian, and Greek politics ; but a French politician has the world for 
his theatre, and for his fellow-actors the most formidable partisans in 
Europe. Associated with France in accord upon almost all questions 
of political principle are Italy and Spain ; like political parties exist 
in each, at the same time arrayed upon different sides of the same 
general issues, for they are all of what are called the Latin races, 
and geographically they uphold France as a pair of supporters in 
heraldry bears up a shield. At the present time we see in Italy, in 
Spain, and in France, a Bourbon party, a Bonaparte party, a Republi- 
can party, and a Democratic party, and the head-quarters of all these 
parties is in Paris, or close by ; there exist the political journals 
which encourage party spirit ; there speaks the talent which turns 
bias into conviction and hope into enthusiasm ; thence go the sugges- 
tions and the apostles of politics, Louis Blanc to England, De 
Tocqueville and Genet to America, Bernadotte to Sweden. When 
Beranger writes a Republican song the winds blow the music of it to 
all the peoples ; when Henri Rochefort publishes a saucy journal the 
Atlantic cable keeps America informed as to its contents. The French 
elections are the only elections that are of consequence to us or to 
Europe ; yet France in her totality is not a state as profoundly agi- 
tated in things political as America ; for a Republic has no other 
national life than politics. Paris is earnest in behalf of the state, 
but the rural provinces of France are pervaded by dense ignorance, 
social, political, and economical ; and it is this element on which 
Bonapartism relies to maintain itself in its bad eminence. Glory can 
reach further than truth, and to this day there are said to be num- 
bers of people in France who vote for the candidates of Napoleon 
III., under the impression that he is the veritable banished man re- 
turned from St. Helena. 

The Imperial party of France and of Europe is almost entirely a 
personal party, with the bulk of it composed of the army, the navy, 



POLITICS, ETC., OF FRANCE AND THE CONTINENT. 557 

and the office-holders, and the rural farmers and village folks closing 
in b} r a sort of stupid necessity ; there also vote with this party a 
majority of the commercial classes, who are not admirers of the em- 
pire, but support it, rather than risk violent change and financial em- 
barrassment. The chances are immensely in favor of an} 7 party that it 
is in; for it has all the fears of prosperous and timid people to argue 
upon, and all the machinery of office to use. It is computed that two 
millions of votes go to the Emperor from people who take his wages and 
eat his potage. The army is powerfully in his favor, and is kept continu- 
ally whetted against the people, and enlivened b} r bounteous treat- 
ment ; the clergy are not with him of choice, but prefer him to a more 
liberal alternative ; the conservative masses who have a dread of so- 
cialism, radicalism, and irreligion cling to Bonaparte as the most en- 
durable horn of the dilemma ; but the genuine Imperial party is made 
up of that small body of soldiers of fortune and adventurers who, 
knowing the lurking love of millions of French for the name of Na- 
poleon Bonaparte, rallied round his exiled nephew, became members 
of his invading corps at Strasbourg and Bologne, and who prepared 
the way to the coup d'etat of 1850 ; all of them are politicians, 
equally desperate with the heroes of revolutionary leagues in Mexico 
and the South American Republics, but often men of exquisite man- 
ners and good education. There are besides, incorporated with this 
party, many marshals and statesmen, who are ready to serve France 
under any administration, and others who owe the Emperor personal 
gratitude. In these notices we are in part indebted to Victor Hugo, 
in part to Mr. Kinglake. 

Most intimately associated with the Emperor was his illegitimate 
brother, the Duke de Moray, child of Hortense Beauharnais by the 
Count of Flahault, aud a family name was purchased for him b} r Hor- 
tense's imperial father-in-law ; to him, toPersigny, and to St. Arnaud, 
Louis Napoleon owes his largest meed of gratitude. Moray was a 
man of great daring, and gifted with more than common powers of 
fascination. He had been a member of the Chamber of Deputies in 
the time of the monarchy ; but he was rather known to the world as a 
speculator than as a politician. " He was a buyer and seller of 
those fractional and volatile interests in trading adventures which go 
by the name of ' shares.' He knew how to found a ' companjV and he 
now undertook to establish institutions which were destined to be 
more lucrative to him than any of his former adventures." 

Moray, when twenty-seven years of age, was a master in all bodily 



558 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

exercises, a passionate steeple-chase rider, a clever racket player, an 
excellent shot, an incomparable sportsman, and renowned for his suc- 
cesses in the salons and boudoirs; he concealed under frivolous 
habits, and the rather English elegance of a man of fashion, the hap- 
piest qualities of mind and character. At an early age, he saw that 
the world progressed with every new government that sprang up, 
and that French society was being transformed. " The Old World," 
(these were his words) " sacrificed everything to form, and the thing 
itself was of little consequence ; a scoundrel with good manners was 
preferred to a well-bred man of honor. All these ideas were filtered 
into me, and my ears were rendered only too sensitive. In order to 
be able to live with others, and correct my judgment, I have been 
obliged to educate myself from the beginning again." He was Pres- 
ident very long of the Corps Legislatif, made an immense fortune, 
and married a Russian Princess of surpassing grace and beauty, 
Persigny, however, was the arch-spirit at the elbow of Louis Napoleon. 
His true name is Fialin, and he was born in 1808 ; originally he was 
a Radical Socialist, but for forty years he has been a Bonapartist poli- 
tician. He married a grand-daughter of Marshal Ney, and received 
from the Emperor at his wedding a gift of one hundred thousand dol- 
lars. Louis Napoleon was, in 1848, elected to the National Assem- 
bly by three departments, through Persigny's manoeuvres. In the 
session of June 13, the validity of these elections was discussed, after 
Lamartine had declared, on the previous day, that he should apply 
the law of 1832, excluding all the Napoleonides from France, against 
Louis Napoleon, until the Assembly revoked it. The debate was 
long and animated, and Louis Blanc, the Socialist, was decidedly 
in favor of admitting the Prince. He employed the memorable 
words : — 

" Let us guard against giving pretenders greater dimensions by 
removing them. It is a good thing to see them close by, for then 
they appear to us as they really are. What did the uncle of Louis 
Napoleon say? He said, 'The Republic is like the sun.' We will 
let the Emperor's nephew approach the sun of our Republic. I am 
convinced that its beams will kill him." 

The prophesy was reversed. The beams of Louis Napoleon's sun 
killed the Republic. 

Guizot expressed his opinion about Persigny in the following 
words : " Persigny is no statesman ; he is a diplomatic gamin" 
Calm judges, however, admit that, with all his errors, Persigny is the 



POLITICS, ETC., OF FRANCE AND THE CONTINENT. 559 

very ablest man in the Napoleonic party. He has been Ambassador 
to Russia and to England. 

Two distinguished partisans of the Emperor have been Maupas and 
Fleury, the latter being thus described : — 

" The man who was the most able to make the President act, to 
drive him deep into his own plot, and fiercely carry him through it, 
was Major Fleury. Fleury was young, but his life had been check- 
ered. He was the son of a Paris tradesman, from whom, at an early 
age, he had inherited a pleasant sum of money. He plunged into 
the enjoyments of Paris with so much ardor, that that phase of his 
career was soon cut short ; but whilst his father's friends w r ere no 
doubt lamenting ten times a day that the boy had ( eaten his fortune,' 
young Fleury was at the foot of the ladder which was destined to 
give him a control over the fate of a mighty nation." 

He enlisted in the army as a common soldier ; but the officers of 
his corps were so well pleased with the young man, and so admired 
the high spirit with which he met his change of fortune, that their 
good will soon caused him to be raised from the ranks. It was per- 
haps his knowledge about horses which first caused him to be attached 
to the staff of the President. 

Maupas, one of the most despised of the Bonapartists, as the 
chief of his police spies, and a fit successor to Fouquier Tinville, has 
been sketched in aquafortis by Kinglake : — 

u This person had been Prefect of the Department of the Upper 
Garronne. Of him, his friends sa} r that he had property, and that he 
had never been used to obtain money dishonestly. 

" His zeal had led him to desire that thirty-two persons, including 
three members of the Council-General, should be seized and thrown 
into prison on a charge of conspiring against the government. The 
legal authorities of the department refused to suffer this, because they 
said there was no ground for the charge. 

" Then this Maupas, or De Maupas, proposed that the want of all 
ground for accusing the men should be supplied by a stratagem, and 
with that view he deliberately offered to arrange that incriminating 
papers and arms and grenades should be secretly placed in the 
houses of the men whom he wanted to have accused. Naturally, the 
legal authorities of the department were horror-struck by the propo- 
sal, and they denounced the Prefect to the Keeper of the Seals. 
Maupas was ordered to Paris. From the indignant and scornful 
presence of M. Faucner he came away sobbing, and people who 



560 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

knew the truth supposed him to be forever disgraced and ruined ; but 
he went and told his sorrows to the President. The President of 
course instantly saw that the man could be suborned. He admitted 
him into the plot, and. on the 27th of October, appointed him Prefect 
of Police." 

/ A gentler spirit, who is now a member of the Emperor's ministry, 
is Victor Duruy, a Protestant. Duruy, the Minister of Instruction, 
characterized the Emperor in the following words : " The most liberal 
man in the empire is the Emperor." 

Duruy owed his present appointment to a clever and opportune bit 
of flattery. He said about the Emperor's " Julius Caesar : " "I could 
not have written it better myself. I say this to the author, not to the 
Emperor." 

Duruy is the author pf a biography of Napoleon III., which, so 
soon as he became minister, he introduced into the French schools as 
a standard historical work. He has also charged the common-school 
histories of France with adulation of the Emperor, whom he appears 
sincerely to admire. 

Drouyn de L'huys, the leading Napoleonic diplomatist, is sixty-four 
years old, and he was not an actor in the coup d'etat; neither is he at 
present in the favor of the Emperor. 

Drouyn de L'huys inherited from his father a fortune of four mil- 
lion francs. His father was a great miser ; and after his death a cask 
was found in his cellar, containing a million in gold. 

With his wife, Drouyn afterwards married a fortune of two hundred 
thousand francs a year. He was, under Guizot, Director of Commerce 
in the foreign ministry, but voted with the opposition, so that Guizot 
at length let him drop. It is said that Guizot formed the following 
judgment about him : " The man wants to be a minister, and is not 
even a good clerk." When Drouyn quitted the ministry and the 
Senate, in 1854, he was so opposed to the existing system, that he had 
engraved on his cards, "Non-Senator." When, in September, 1862, 
Louis Napoleon offered him the portfolio of foreign affairs, which he 
had thrice held, he replied, " I shall not accept it to-day ; but I may 
do so to-morrow." — " What do you mean by that? " Napoleon asked. 
" I must first know the conditions. I will not enter on office through 
a door where I shall be obliged to stoop." When he eventually ac- 
cepted the portfolio, in October, he said, " I am willing to be the 
driver, but I must protest against the string being pulled in the mid- 
dle of the drive, and being ordered to turn back." 



POLITICS, ETC., OF TRANCE AND THE CONTINENT. 561 

Thouvenel has been another leading minister of the Empire, and 
an anecdote in his life shows that there is petticoat government even 
in France. 

Two months before the Emperor himself dismissed Thouvenel, the 
latter not only sent in his resignation, in consequence of a violent 
scene with Eugenie, but declared that he would leave Paris and 
France, unless satisfaction were afforded him. Upon this, Eugenie 
stated she was sorry for having gone too far, and insulted a tried 
servant of the Emperor. After giving this explanation, however, the 
Empress seized her son's hand, hurried to the Emperor's Cabinet, to 
which he had retired after the above scene, and said to him, " You 
are deceived, Louis. Thouvenel wishes to induce you to overthrow 
the papacy, because social order and the existence of our dynasty 
depend on its preservation." The Emperor answered, " Who tells 
you that I wish to overthrow the Pope?" — " Yes, I am sure they 
want to destroy the papacy," the Empress interposed. " Calm your- 
self, madame," the Emperor continued ; " everything will be arranged 
in accordance with your wishes." 

Both Eugenie and the young Prince Imperial figure unduly in the 
political gossip of the empire. 

The Imperial Prince attended one of the recent series of manoeu- 
vres at Chalons, on horseback, and always dined by the Emperor's 
side. At the grand dinner, with which the manoeuvres concluded, 
Marshal Randon rose and said, " I drink the health of the Imperial 
Prince, the hope of the army." All present joined in. The little 
Prince, for whom his father poured out some champagne, drank a few 
drops, and replied, without any suggestion, " I drink the health of 
the army, and hope to become a good soldier." 

As a soldier and a writer, the Emperor is without doubt clever, like 
all his family. 

The Napoleonides were all authors. It is well known that the 
first Napoleon wrote tragedies. His brother Joseph published, in 
1799, a romance, — "Moyna;" Lucien Bonaparte wrote a ro- 
mance, — " Stellina" — and an epic poem, pointed against his brother, 
" Charlemagne ; or, the Liberated Church," the honorarium for which 
was the principality of Canino, given him by the Pope. Louis 
Bonaparte (the father of Napoleon III.) wrote a romance — " Marie ; " 
then another, "The Torments of Love ; or, the Dutchman ; " and 
lastly a work, — "Holland under Louis." Achille Murat, the son 
of the ex-King of Naples, who went to America in 1821, wrote a 
71 



562 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

book about America. The works of Napoleon III. are well 
known. 

St. Arnaud, properly named Leroy, who was Minister of War at 
the time of the coup d'etat, and Commander-in-Chief of the French in 
the Crimea, was also a brilliant writer, though unprincipled, and 
Kinglake says of him what may almost as truthfully be said of Louis 
Napoleon's writings : — 

" It would be impossible for the most skilful novelist, for the most 
practised and successful elaborator of dramatic incidents, to exceed 
in tragic power the effect De St. Arnaud's correspondence has upon 
the mind of the attentive reader. With all the charm of familiar 
pleasantries, unguarded verdicts on men and events, playful en- 
dearments, realizing most completely the strictly private nature of 
these letters, now given to the world, there is a dark figure in the 
background, to which the eye turns constantly. This figure — 
struggling with an inexorable disease, impelled hither and thither by 
an ambition that knew no bounds ; heroically rising to do battle, 
with the livid hues of death upon its brow — is that of the Mar- 
shal/' 

Passing by the Napoleonist party for the present, we come to the 
other two personal parties of France, the Bourbons and the Orlean- 
ists. 

The House of Bourbon, which has intermarried with almost all 
the old Catholic dynasties of Europe, derives its name from the 
castle of Bourbon, in the centre of France ; the Seignors of this 
castle intermarried with the royal family, Capet, six hundred years 
ago, and a branch of the House mounted to the throne in the person 
of the Huguenot King, Henry IV. ; one of the grandsons of Henry 
IV". was Louis XIV., the Grand, and another was Philippe, Duke of 
Orleans ; hence arose from the same stock the rival houses of Bour- 
bon and Orleans. When Louis XVI. was condemned to death by the 
Republicans, the Duke of Orleans voted for his ' execution ; when 
Charles X., the last reigning Bourbon, was driven from France, Louis 
Philippe, Duke of Orleans, accepted his crown. The Bourbons inter- 
married with the royal families of Naples, Parma, Placenza, and Spain, 
while the House of Orleans intermarried with the royal family of 
Belgium. The highest family connection of the Bonapartes As the 
House of Savoy, — the oldest in Europe and now dominant in Italy, 
— if we omit the marriage of Napoleon Bonaparte with the House of 
Hapsburg, which gave him a child, whose mother afterward married 



POLITICS, ETC., OF FRANCE AND THE CONTINENT. 563 

her Chamberlain during her husband's life. Harriet Martineau 
affectingly describes the exodus of the last Bourbon King from 
France in the person of Charles X. : — 

" When the train arrived on the heights above Cherbourg, the 
spectacle that met the eyes of the travellers was very affecting. 
The vessels in the harbor carried the tri-color, all but two, — two 
ships in the distance, whose sails were hung out, and all evidently 
ready for immediate departure. These were American vessels en- 
gaged to carry the royal family into exile. The travelling-party 
drove through the town without stopping, and immediately went on 
board the ' Great Britain,' the soldiers on the quay presenting arms, 
and their officers saluting in grave silence, as the exiles passed. An 
officer waited on the King, to inquire whither he should have the 
honor of escorting him. ' To Spithead, England,' was the re- 
ply." 

The French clergy has been at all times even a more formidable 
enemy of liberal institutions than the French nobility, and in the 
indignation of patriotic sentiment against them arose much of that 
infidelity and irreligion which characterize a large minority of 
Frenchmen. The first Napoleon adroitly managed to encourage the 
national priesthood, while he intimidated the Pope, and he extorted 
from the latter the privilege of regulating the churchmen within his 
own dominions ; there are, therefore, two religious political parties of 
French Catholics, — the Galileans and the Ultra-Montanes, — which, in 
some degree, correspond to the Ghibellines and Guelphs of feudal 
times; the Galileans are headed, of course, by the Emperor, and 
while they recognize the primacy of the Roman Pontiff over the 
universal church, they assert the independence of national churches 
in self-government and local discipline ; the Ultra-Montanes are 
headed by Montalembert and others, who hold that the Papal pre- 
rogative should have more weight than the self-government of 
national churches. Montalembert, a brilliant orator and writer, and 
a most consistent and uncompromising advo*cate of his church, and 
of religious and political liberty, stands at the head of a small, but 
intellectual body of Catholics, who claim that worship should be free, 
not subject to political restrictions, and who also belong to the radical 
opposition party in politics, holding the Emperor's coup d'etat to have 
been a usurpation which neither the present age nor posterity will 
forgive Montalembert is an admirer of the English government, 



564: THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

and during the American civil war he wrote a most vigorous pam- 
phlet in favor of the Union, and the triumph of its arms. 

The Legitimate party of France is still of some decaying social 
prominence, and at the head of it stands the Count of Chambord, — 
the grandson of the last Bourbon King, now (1869) forty-nine years 
of age ; he goes by the name, among his party, of Henri V., but he 
dare not appear on French territory, and spends his time alternating 
between Venice, Vienna, the German gambling baths, and London, 
holding, as he goes, pompous drawing-rooms, attended by a few senti- 
mental old nobles ; like all the later French Bourbons he is an im- 
becile, and being childless, he consented a few years ago to combine 
the claims of his line with that of the Orleans family, so that at 
present the Count of Paris, Louis Philippe's grandson, and formerly 
aide-de-camp to General Geo. B. McClellan, may be considered, next 
to the Napoleons, the favorite of the whole limited monarchical party 
for the succession to the crown of France ; the latter — young, not 
yet in the prime of life — has passed his years for the most part in 
England and in Spain ; he has intermarried with his cousin, a mem- 
ber of the House of Bourbon, and bides his time, in the possession 
of wealth, if not of contentment. Louis Napoleon, who was treated 
with too tender consideration by Louis Philippe, has pursued the 
Orleans family with zealous severity ; he confiscated their vast private 
estates ; he forbade the King of Italy to receive the chivalrous young 
Orleanists into his army as volunteers in the war of 1866 ; and when 
these princes espoused the cause of the Union Army in 1862, the 
Emperor hastened to make overtures to England to recognize the 
disruption of the United States. A prince of this sort may wear the 
conceit of Augustus, and write the life of Caesar ; but he will fail to 
receive the serious admiration of the worthy part of mankind. The 
Orleans princes, whose grandfather was a school-teacher, and whose 
fathers were sent to the public schools, while the children of a 
reigning King, have behaved with such dignified, yet Republican sim- 
plicity as to obtain praise in mouths of wisest censure ; the mass of 
Americans at this day are undoubtedly their well-wishers, if not their 
partisans. 

M. Berryer, who died recently, was born in 1790, and was one of 
the most amiably bigoted of royalists and legitimists, besides being 
the most fervid and classical orator of France ; he owed his popularity 
to the uprightness of his life, and the honesty of his convictions, and 
also to the pains he took to defend people of all parties, whom the 



POLITICS, ETC., OF FRANCE AND THE CONTINENT. 565 

government prosecuted. He defended Louis Napoleon after the fail- 
ure of the Boulogne filibustering raid, and he defended Montalem- 
bert when prosecuted in 1848. Benyer is one of those characters 
who seem irreconcilable with popular government, preferring the feel- 
ing of loyalty to that of independence, and wishing to be a subject, 
though of an unworthy King. The young imbecile, who goes by the 
name of Count de Chambord, he called to the end of his days, Henri 
V., and addressed a dying letter to him in the terms of " Henri, O 
mon roi ! " 

Guizot, the head of Louis Philippe's cabinet, was born in 1847, in 
the south of France, and is a Protestant. He is an unloved, austere, 
scrupulous, and educated man, an author and historian of rare ac- 
complishments, and a writer upon American history. As a politician 
he has been voted into obscurity, under the empire. Thiers, who was 
associated with him under the Orleans government, was born in 1797, 
of poor mechanical parents, and is considered one of the most formi- 
dable debaters, and one of the best politicians in France. He was 
the French Palmerston, the positive man of a negative and commer- 
cial sovereign, and he is the author of the greatest historical work 
which recent France has produced, while he has also made the most 
comprehensive and nettlesome speeches against Louis Napoleon from 
his place in the Corps Legislatif. Thiers made his entrance into public 
life as a journalist, like the best of French politicians, and was an 
ally of Armand Carrel, who perished in a duel with Emile de 
Girarclin, the best of living newspaper editors in France, and perhaps 
in the world. 

Girardin, like several eminent Senators of the United States, is an 
illegitimate son, and a smart, unstable politician. It was he, though 
Republican, who nominated Louis Napoleon for President, and he was 
the earliest to turn against the arch-traitor. 

Girardin is a man past middle age, and of middle height. His hair, 
which is scanty behind, but fuller on the temples, falls in a carefully 
folded curl over his forehead, under which, clever but unsteady eyes 
stand forth. The slight squint in one eye produces a disagreeable 
impression ; but even more disagreeable is Girardin' s harsh voice, 
especially when he is speaking loudly and eagerly. Girardin appears 
most pleasant and natural when alone. In the Chamber he often 
produces the effect of an actor, through the tricks he employs, owing 
to his deficiency in oratory. 

Girardin is immensely rich. As he was accused of venality, he 



566 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

said in the Chamber, " I am accused of mercenary motives in order 
to estrange the sympathies of the nation, although those who spread 
these wretched calumnies know as well as you, gentlemen, that there 
is no one rich enough to buy me. My ambition has nothing in com- 
mon with avarice. All France cannot offer me a post which would 
secure me even one-half of my income. " Other great journalists of 
France are Picard and Pelletan, both obdurate Democrats. De 
Tocqueville made a comparison between French and American 
journalists, which was truer of forty years ago than of the present 
day : — 

" The characteristics of the French journalist consist in a violent, 
but frequently an eloquent and lofty manner of discussing the politics 
of the da}^ ; and the exceptions to this habitual practice are only 
occasional. The characteristics of the American journalist consist 
in an open and coarse appeal to the passions of the populace ; and 
he habitually abandons the principles of political science, to assail 
the characters of individuals, to track them into private life, and 
disclose all their weaknesses and errors." 

The narrow jealousy with which Napoleon and the monarchs of 
Europe regard the newspaper press is really a cause of its power. 
The enlightened mind of the greatest of French critics upon America 
observed that : — 

" The extreme license of the press tends indirectly to the mainten- 
ance of public order. The individuals who are already in the 
possession of a high station in the esteem of their fellow-citizens are 
afraid to write in the newspapers, and they are thus deprived of the 
most powerful instrument which they can use to excite the passions 
of the multitude to their own advantage. 

" The personal opinions of the editors have no kind of weight in 
the eyes of the public ; the only use of a journal is, that it imparts 
the knowledge of certain facts, and it is only by altering or distorting 
those facts that a journalist can contribute to the support of his own 
views. 

" But, although the press is limited to these recourses, its influence 
in America is immense. It is the power which impels the circulation 
of political life through all the districts of that vast territory. Its 
e} r e is constantly open to detect the secret springs of political de- 
signs, and to summon the leaders of all parties to the bar of public 
opinion. It rallies the interests of the community round certain 



POLITICS, ETC., OF FRANCE AND THE CONTINENT. 567 

principles, and it draws up the creed which factions adopt ; for it 
affords a means of intercourse between parties which hear, and which 
address each other, without ever having been in immediate contact. 
"When a great number of the organs of the press adopt the same line 
of conduct, their influence becomes irresistible, and public opinion, 
when it is perpetually assailed from the same side, eventually yields 
to the attack. In the United States, each separate journal exercises 
but little authority ; but the power of the periodical press is only 
second to that of the people." 

The Republican party of France is properly the Orleans party, 
believing in a constitutional government, and if necessary, a citizen 
King. The Democratic party is the old party of the Revolution, 
which has learned little more moderation and caution than the Bour- 
bons. The American Republicans, except in the indicated permanence 
of their institutions, are little remarked in France, although the 
resident American population of Paris is from five to fifteen thousand. 
It is ordinarily no more than the former figure. It supports in the 
city of Paris eight special restaurants, four American physicians, 
four dentists, and five banking-houses. It has no newspaper, truth- 
fully speaking, the Franco-American being printed, not in Paris, as 
alleged, but in London, and folded in Paris. The Paris " Times " is an 
English weekty, dated at Paris, likewise, and devoted to praising all 
the hotels which will advertise. " Galignani's Messenger " (pronounced 
Gally-nanny) is the only daily paper in the English language pub- 
lished on the continent, if we except the " Levant Herald," at Constan- 
tinople, which is sometimes a daily and sometimes a monthly. The 
Galignanis were Italians, resident in England, and in 1814, when 
Napoleon was beaten to Elba the enormous number of Englishmen 
that came pell-mell to Paris, to triumph in the humiliation of France 
and see its monuments, suggested to them a bookstore and reading- 
room, and afterward a news circular. This was a mere tract at first, 
but in the long peace that ensued twenty thousand Englishmen a year 
crossed the Straits of Dover, and ten thousand of these settled in 
Paris ; the little daily paper grew apace, until now it is of ordinary 
size, and the subscription price of it is thirty dollars a year in 
gold. 

It is cheaply edited, being in great part reproductions or transla- 
tions of news, and editorials from French, German, and English 
journals ; and is so closely managed that if you desire to buy five 



568 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD, 

copies of any number you must order them the night before issue. 
The Galignanis report an income of twenty-five thousand dollars a 
year. The senior brother has been decorated with the cross of the 
Legion of Honor, and, together, they have founded a small hospital 
for Englishmen at Neuilly, near Paris. Their guide-book of Paris 
is the best in the English language, and they have published better 
editions of Byron than any English house. 

The Galignanis, however, neither in their paper nor themselves, are 
of the slightest political influence in France, but are a copartnership 
of shrewd and prudent money-makers, who are probably Imperialists, 
if anything, and who take particular care to stir up no imperial en- 
mity to their flourishing trade. The French Republicans, indeed, get 
little sympathy from any recognized American official instrumentality 
in France, and the Imperial government seems to master all our minis- 
ters in turn, so that even General Dix, when he gave up his mission 
on the eve of an important French election, devoted his last official 
appearance to a eulogy upon the Emperor. We generally send amia- 
ble gentlemen to represent us abroad, but seldom gentlemen who seem 
to be aware of political proprieties. 

These defects of understanding in our agents are particularly an- 
noying if not embarrassing to French republicans, who expect coun- 
tenance, certainly not opposition, from us, as the model nation by 
whose example they appeal. 

Chief amongst the radical Democrats is probably Jules Favre, the 
great classical advocate of Paris. This orator is the Mirabeau of the 
era : the man who means mischief to the empire, and never conceals 
it ; who never took the personal oath to the Emperor, but evaded it, 
by standing up in his seat and saying : " Je jure." He is an old-time 
Republican, austere and bilious, and a long hater, who will never 
serve when appointed on any committee to the throne, but maintains 
himself prince-like, by the practice of law, and is the conscience 
of the future and the past, in the face of this temporary despotism. 
Standing in court, on a trivial political cause, his presence is like that 
of Daniel Webster, in the height of his national fame, pleading a 
civil matter. Favre is scarcely more than fifty-five. His voice is 
clear, and powerful as Spurgeon's. His separate arguments, on 
whatever subject, are monuments of pure and beautiful construction, 
and with a wit that is of the basis of cold steel, he flashes it so 
dexterously that you do not see the murder in it. Out of this deadly 



POLITICS, ETC., OF FRANCE AND THE CONTINENT. 569 

by-play, rising into gladiatorial stature, he gives direct and thunderous 
assault, never faltering, nor gathering breath, his eyes burning yel- 
low under their inexhaustible reservoirs, flinging a baneful light upon 
the arena, and his own goodly height, rising and expanding till, in 
the end, there is no audience, nor disputant, nor tribunal, but only 
this magnificent intellectual engine, silent at the foot of the pyramid 
of argument he has spontaneously erected. 

This is Jules Favre, with his grayish-brown hair pushed straight 
back, leonine, like Calhoun's, — more imperial in the minority, than 
he who decrees and it is done. He is of the temperament of 
Thomas H. Benton, with the elastic manners and facilities of Clay, 
provided you tell them both to carry their point without awakening 
a lion in the same room, that w T ould be apt to eat them if he got 
up. 

The oratory of France in the present age is far in advance of that 
of all contemporary legislative bodies, and immeasurably fine by the 
side of that of the American House of Representatives, where it is 
still the rule, as M. De Tocqueville remarked, that " there is hardly a 
member of Congress who can make up his mind to go home without 
having despatched at least one speech to his constituents ; nor who 
will endure any interruption until he has introduced into his harangue 
whatever useful suggestions may be made touching the States of 
which the Union is composed, and especially the district which he 
represents. He therefore presents to the mind of his auditors a suc- 
cession of great general truths (which he himself only comprehends 
and expresses confusedly), and of petty minutiae, which he is but too 
able to discover and to point out. The consequence is that the 
debates of that great assembly are frequently vague and perplexed, 
and that they seem rather to drag their slow length along than to 
advance towards a distinct object." 

The Democratic party of France includes some terrible spirits, and 
no less terrible superstitions, of which latter are Socialism and 
Communism. 

Communism is a more radical and extravagant form of Socialism, 
the latter aiming to redistribute property and labor, and organize 
society upon the principle of co-operation instead of by competition 
as at present ; the Communist, however, proposes to abolish domestic 
government, parental authority, and the relation of husband and 
wife. The Socialist does not strike at the roots of domestic life, but 
argues that many of the vicissitudes and privations of the bulk of 
72 



570 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

mankind axe due to the unequal distribution of the soil ; the Socialist, 
therefore, is merely a very radical Republican, but the Commun- 
ist often urges that not alone arc the distinctions of wealth unfair, but 
that the family relation itself is artificial. The greatest of the 
Socialists is Louis Blano J the most illustrious of the Communists was 
Fourier, while the father of the latter sect was St. Simon. 

Louis Blanc was born in Spain, in 1813, and in early life was a 
lawyer's clerk, and a teacher ; later he became an editor, an author, 
and an orator, and in 1848 he was driven from France to London, 
where he became a remarkable journalist and historian, writing with 
facility in both languages; his history of the French Revolution is a 
book of immense research, and in part is probably the best account 
of that great popular uprising. Blanc, has hundreds of thousands 
of disciples among the French working-men ; his principal socialistic 
work is entitled " The Organization of Labor," and it advocates the 
absorption of the individual in a vast " solidary," where each would 
receive according to his needs, and contribute according to his abili- 
ties. A huge scries of national workshops were actually constructed 
in Paris, upon Blanc's plan; but they proved unsuccessful, and were 
abandoned. Louis Blanc has shown much dignity of character, and 
his life lias probably been useful to mankind ; his writings have been 
translated into almost all languages, and he has adherents in every 
country, even in England. 

St. Simon was a French nobleman, descended from Charlemagne, 
born at Paris in 17(H), well educated, and given a commission in the 
French army, which he accompanied to America, and he fought with 
distinction at the capture of Yorktown, receiving the personal en- 
comium of Washington ; he sympathized with the French Revolution, 
became immensely rich, and set himself to work with a wonderful 
method and perseverance to discover and elaborate a system of reor- 
ganizing society and government; in the prosecution of this inquiry 
he spent enormous sums of money in entertaining men of science 
and oi' literature, and finally he became poor, to hunger and beggary ; 
the latter part of his life was made comfortable, and he became the 
head of a sect which stilUexists to hold his name in reverence. The 
story of St. Simoifs life is entertaining and startling beyond that of 
almost any man of letters. His theory was, that religion ought to 
direct, all the social forces toward the moral and physical ameliora- 
tion of the class which is at once the most numerous and the most 
poor ; he conceived a social hierarchy, which should direct this ainel- 



POLITICS, ETC., OF FRANCE AND THE CONTINENT. 571 

ioration, — a new spiritual church, sanctifying science and industry, 

regulating vocations, fixing salaries, dividing heritages, and taking 

the best measures to make the labors of each conduce to the good of 
all. St. Simon's system is therefore reactionary against the Christi- 
anity which pays no attention to science; for be Conceived that 
Christianity was by nature progressive, and meant to be modified by 

the changing circumstances of times and countries, whereas lie 
alleged that it had been stiffened into dogmas, and that its clergy 
was ignorant of the thoughts, manners, and studies of modern 
times. 

Fourier died in 1837; he had been a merchant's son and a 
traveller, and in the Revolution had lost both his fortune and his 
liberty; but while employed at Marseilles in superintending the 
destruction of an immense quantity of rice, held for higher prices in 
time of famine until it had rotted, his attention was called to the 
frauds and duplicities of commerce, and he set to work to invent 
some plan, whereby the people might be made independent of grasp- 
ing capitalists ; the consequence was, his system of Socialism, which 
he elaborated by patient years of thought and writing, living mean- 
time in the most frugal manner, alone, and befriended chiefi}' by bis 
own enthusiasm ; at the clo^e of his life a small group of intellectual 
men gathered around him, learned of his system from his own lips, 
and became its apostles. Amongst these were some Americans, who 
translated and published one of his large books in New York. Fourier 
believed that association would produce general riches, honesty, 
attractive and varied industry, peace, health, and happiness ; he 
therefore projected associations, or phalansteries, to consist of four 
hundred families, or eighteen hundred persons, living in one immense 
edifice in the centre of a large and highly cultivated domain, furnished 
with workshops, studios, and instruments of industry and amuse- 
ment. When the earth is covered with such palaces, they will unite 
in groups and series under a unitary government ; there will be but 
one language ; the only armies will be great armies of industry, to 
irrigate, drain, and plant. Fourier does not make war directly upon 
morals or religion. The property of his associations is to be held in 
shares, five out of every twelve shares of which are due to labor, four 
to capital, and three to talent. In his phalansteries the expense of 
living would be reduced two-thirds, and the products of labor quad- 
rupled. 

Fourier and his disciples have worked incessantly to obtain enough 



572 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

capital to make experiments upon this plan ; an eccentric English- 
man — Robert Owen — started three phalansteries, one in America^ 
one in Scotland, and a third in England. 

The most remarkably educated of all Socialists was Auguste 
Comte ; the most extravagant, was probably Proudhon. Auguste 
Cointe, one of the pupils of St. Simon, is the author of what is 
called the "Positive Philosophy," which has an immense number of 
disciples in France, and throughout the world ; he considers theology 
and metaphysics to be disturbing elements in civilization, and pro- 
poses a new religion, and a new philosophy, based entirely upon 
discovering the laws of phenomena, and discarding as vain all in- 
quiries into the causes and essences of things. 

The extraordinary dissemination of socialistic principles from 
France throughout the world is attributable to the success of the 
French Revolution, which broke up the great landed estates of the 
aristocracy, redistributed property in small parcels, and immensely 
elevated the condition of the laboring classes. Panting for still 
more extended benefits, radical Republicans of France have conceived 
the distribution did not go far enough, that the Revolution became 
conservative too soon, and that the evils of mankind can in great part 
be avoided by annihilating the property, and even the family institu- 
tion. 

One of the strictest and most penurious business men this coun- 
try' has had — Stephen Girard — was at the same time a Jacobin 
Republican ; his vessels were named the " Voltaire," the " Rousseau," 
and the " Montesquieu." He directed in his will that no clergyman 
should be allowed to enter the grounds of the Girard College, which 
he endowed, and the only religious people in whom he had any con- 
fidence were the Quakers. 

Socialistic experiments have been frequently made in this country, 
and some of them continue to this day, while in some places Com- 
munism has been mixed with extreme superstition. The most success- 
ful phalanstery that we have, is of the latter class, and it is called 
the Oneida Community, wherein gross sensualit}^, blasphemy, and 
industry are about equally represented. Of communistic associations 
organized directly upon the plans of Robert Owen and Fourier, we 
have had recent examples in the environs of New York, at Red Bank, 
and at Modern Times. While it is common to say that France is 
eminently the land of Socialism, the remark is not unfrequently made 
in Europe that America is also filled with socialistic biases ; in 1866 




HALLS OF LEGISLATION. 
-The Saloon of State, Paris. 2— The Senate of France. 3— The House of 
Commons, London. 4— The House of Kepresentatives, Washington. 



POLITICS, ETC., OF FRANCE AND THE CONTINENT. 573 

Mr. Hepworth Dixon filled a large book with accounts of communistic 
sects and bands which he had visited in the United States. It is 
not improbable that, as our country grows more densely populated, 
we shall have in some form socialistic agitations amongst the work- 
ing people, and these may become embittered by the strides of great 
corporations and by combinations of capitalists to affect the prices of 
the necessaries of life. 

The French student, and the student-class generally on the conti- 
nent of Europe, is more liberal and generous than the student-class 
of England, where reaction begins in the nursery. 

It was to me almost incomprehensible to witness one day, before 
Uecole des Beaux Artes, a prolonged riot between the art-students 
and the Sergeants de Ville, all because of an obnoxious profes- 
sor. 

What had he done ? Insulted them, refused their sketches, made 
unfair discrimination in awards ? 

No ! His crime was far greater. He had expressed a doubt of the 
power of Eugene Delacroix ; and for this transgression of the truthful 
perception of art he was mobbed, and his resignation demanded. 
We once had a riot in our own country over the disputed merits of 
two actors ; but it was international, not aesthetic, and its heroes were 
butcher boys. Shall we ever reach that enthusiasm for art when we 
will stand guard over a picture with cudgels, or break a statue simply 
because it is bad? 

The irreligious party of France is represented by such men as 
Ernest Renan, the author of the " Secular Life of Christ." Napoleon 
III. expressed to the Italian ambassador in Paris his displeasure that 
Renan had been granted a decoration by Victor Emmanuel. " Sire," 
the envoy replied, " we believed we were acting in accordance with 
your intentions, as you, in your speech from the throne, entered 
decidedly on the liberal path." — " I shall turn back," Napoleon said 
to this ; " the nation are ungrateful ; by granting their wishes, it 
only makes their mouths water for fresh concessions. " To which the 
envoy retorted, " The people of Paris will soon take occasion to dis- 
play their ingratitude ; and they will elect Picard " (the government 
candidate), " and not Pelletan." — " You are mistaken," the Emperor 
replied. " Pelletan will be elected, and I shall be glad at its hap- 
pening ; for the result of this election will prove that the destructive 
parties in France still have a broad bottom, and that I am still a 
necessity." 



574 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

A fierce political campaign in France was well exemplified in the 
election of Louis Bonaparte for President, when, through the exer- 
tions of Persigny, legions of emissaries were sent into the country 
to work on the fancy of the people by fabulous promises, pamphlets, 
and songs. Peddlers of every description smuggled his portrait into 
everybody's hands ; upon snuff and work boxes, upon eveiything 
that offered the space, appeared the inevitable physiognomy with the 
goat's beard and mustache. An army of organ-grinders was sent 
through all the towns, and sang, to the tune of the " Trois coiileurs," 
the praise of the hero of Boulogne and Strasbourg. Absurd rumors 
were spread about : at one place it was said the candidate intended 
to give a million to the troops ; at another, that he had promised a 
milliard to the workmen. Electoral committees, agents, newspapers, 
— all praised the man who was scarce able to keep his English mil- 
liner and his horse, and who was still in debt for the brilliant- 
mounted grand cross of the Legion of Honor, and the plumed hat in 
which he looked like a circus-rider. The organ-grinders sang in the 
streets of all large towns, " Francais, voulez-vous die bon, Choissez 
Napoleon ! " 

The elections in France for the Corps Legislatif, in 1869, resulted 
as follows : government candidates elected, one hundred and ninety- 
three ; opposition candidates elected, ninety. The number of the op- 
position party in the previous Corps Legislatif was forty-five. This 
result gave the greatest alarm to the Bonaparte party, and led to the 
proposed reforms as cited in the preceding chapter ; for although 
Napoleon's candidates were still in the majority, even a loss of posi- 
tion is scarcely less a disaster where one's enemies are so uncompro- 
mising. 

" On how many votes can the Opposition count?" Napoleon asked 
Persigny, prior to a previous election to the Legislative Assembly. 

" They will get twenty-five," Persigny replied. 

" That is a great deal too many," the Emperor said, earnestly. 
" The Opposition which eventually overthrew the Restoration was at 
first only seventeen strong." 

The main features of the late Parisian elections, according to a 
newspaper correspondent are, on the one side, the annihilation of the 
government interest in that great city, and on the other side the cold- 
blooded and successful resolution of the electors to send to the House 
not only decided opponents, but the most dangerous, the most 
inimical, or, as is said in Paris, the most " irreconcilable " of oppo- 



POLITICS, ETC., OF FRANCE AND THE CONTINENT. 575 

nents. MM. Garnier-Pages and Carnot are eliminated, not as sus- 
pected, but as not sufficient for the deadly war. M. Gueroult is 
swept away for parleying with Prince Napoleon, as Ollivier did with 
the Emperor. M. Jules Favre is in danger for having shown too 
much politeness to M. Rouher, and for having asserted in the House 
that habit of complimentary exordium, which is a rule and an orna- 
ment of the bar. And if } t ou will get at the true reason for the 
clean sweep of the Parisian representatives, you will find in the end 
that they are blamed and dismissed for having sat six years in the 
House without having contrived any great and decisive event, and 
for having confronted the government during six years without having 
been able to overthrow it. 

In 1863 about five million three hundred thousand electors voted 
for official candidates, and one million eight hundred thousand against 
them. This year (1869) we have about four million electors true to 
official or agreeable candidates, and three million two hundred thou- 
sand against them ; and that is to say, only a majority of about eight 
hundred thousand voices is left in France to the existing government. 

11 The last of the public political meetings," says the correspond- 
ent, u was held last night, the law forbidding any assemblages of this 
sort during the five days next preceding the opening of the polls. 
The first day on wmich they were permitted was the 2d of May 
(1869). During this fortnight we have had in the Department of the 
Seine two hundred and fifteen of these meetings. The restrictions 
with which the law that permits them hedges them about have hitherto 
been noticed. Considering the irritating nature of these restrictions, 
and considering that all persons taking part in them, under the age 
of forty-nine years, namely, nine-tenths of all the participants, were 
exercising their right of assembling for the first .time in their lives, it 
ought to be admitted that the Paris people have creditably carried out 
their share of the experiment. And even the authorities — consider- 
ing what they are — almost deserve a good mark. They have not 
dissolved more than twenty or thirty meetings during the fortnight." 

When w r e pass French politics and come to the wider arena of Euro- 
pean politics, we shall find that Italy is the most restless state in 
Europe, — the land of Mazzini, Garibaldi, and their great party of 
compatriots ; while Switzerland is the neutral ground where the dis- 
contented public spirits meet, — Poles, Bohemians, Magyars, Ger- 
mans, and French ; that little space of mountain land, as in the days 
of the Griitli, is still the scene of holy midnight conspiracy, and the 



576 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

most remarkable of its refugees has been Joseph Mazzini, born in 
1808, the founder of the Young Europe Party, — an ardent, eloquent, 
and unfortunate patriot and author, and the political father of Gari- 
baldi, whose political views he has himself expressed as follows : — 

" The birth and growth of national life in Italy were Republican, 
and gave origin to our Communes before the da} r s of Rome. Our 
national life was Republican, and creator of the idea of unity in 
Rome, before the Empire ; and Republican in its new birth and growth 
in our cities of the Middle Ages, repealing the Italian mission in 
Europe, and extending the link of moral unity from people to peo- 
ple, through religion, art, industry, and commerce. All our great 
records are Republican, and nearly all our great men, whether of heart 
or intellect, were Republicans. The tendencies and customs of our 
civil life, and of our dawning social institutions, are Republican, 
Italy has had Patriarchs, but no patriciate condottieri; merchant 
rulers who had raised themselves above their fellow-citizens, by arms 
or wealth, but not an aristocracy similar to those of other European 
lands, compact, united, guided by universally accepted leaders, ana 
directed by a single political aim." 

Garibaldi, one of the most famed names in modern history, was a 
poor fisherman's boy, born in Nice, sixty-one years ago. The first 
thing remembered of him is that he nearly lost his life, to save 
a poor washerwoman from drowning. He saw his country divided 
into twenty little states, each subject to a tyrant whose power lay 
in mercenary foreign soldiery ; and foreign kings, under the affecta- 
tion of a protectorate, commanded these petty tyrants, so that the 
people were kept poor, ignorant, and servile. Great, fat convents and 
abbeys, free from taxation, covered the land, the occupants of which 
held fealty only to the Pope, and these had no sympathy with free- 
dom. Garibaldi learned to hate the name of the King. He became 
a Republican while yet a boy, and, visiting Rome, saw that ancient 
and glorious city, the natural and traditional capital of Italy, full of 
ignorance and violence. He joined a secret society of patriots, was 
detected by spies, and compelled to fly to a foreign land. 

He became a sailor, and, after many voyages, arrived in South 
America, where the people were throwing off the yoke of their 
despots. He raised the flag of the Republic of Uraguay, put to sea 
in a schooner, and fought several desperate engagements. At last 
shot down on his deck, he was dragged ashore , chained in a dungeon, 
and tortured ; but escaping, raised the Republican flag again, and 



POLITICS, ETC., OF PRANCE AND THE CONTINENT. 577 

battled till the day of independence. Then, in 1848, with his Italian 
troops he sailed from South America for his own country, carrying 
back his wife Anna, a noble and courageous woman, who had ridden 
often into action at his side. Soon afterwards the people rose against 
their tyrants, over all the peninsula. Garibaldi marched to Rome 
at the head of his command. There Frenchmen and Neapolitans had 
beleaguered the city. The Pope had run away. Garibaldi beat the 
French and the Bourbons in several splendid engagements. Finally 
enormous numbers overturned the Roman Republic. 

Garibaldi took to the mountains for the cause of the union of 
Italy, saying in his proclamation, "I offer you hunger, thirst, cold, 
war, and death ; he who accepts these terms, let him follow me ! " 

His conduct in this desperate engagement was the perfection of gen- 
eralship. Sherman never moved men more skilfully, nor did Sheridan 
ever make more sagacious battle. The Austrians, the French, and 
the Neapolitan mercenaries closed round his gallant little band ; 
and the hero's wife, refusing to desert him, died of hunger and fatigue 
at his side. Death was proclaimed to whoever should give him shel- 
ter now. He escaped at last and sailed for New York, an exile. For 
three years he worked with Signor Meucci, his countryman, on Staten 
Island ; and seeing, at last, the people's cause rising again, he re- 
turned to Nice, his birthplace. 

In 1859, Italy declared war. Garibaldi's services were gladly 
accepted against the Austrians, and his command was called " The 
Hunters of the Alps." He did the severest and noblest service of 
the war. In 1860, in the month of November, Garibaldi sailed by 
night, through the foreign fleets at Genoa, with a handful of brave 
men, landed at Sicily, drove out the mercenaries, marched through to 
the island, conquering, crossed the Straits, advanced upon Naples, 
and gave half of the whole country to Victor Emmanuel. His cam- 
paign, in this case, was equal to any of Napoleon Bonaparte's. Still 
the superstition of Europe maintained the Roman State, — a patch, 
a blot, upon the map of Italy. In 1862, Garibaldi, with the watch- 
word of "Rome, or death," moved upon the imperial city. The 
minister of the King, Ratazzi, a pupil of the Jesuits, and then, as 
now, a paid creature of Louis Napoleon, ordered regular troops to 
capture Garibaldi. 

The hero would not permit his volunteers to fire upon their country- 
men, who, not so generous, shot down two hundred of the red-shirts, 
and kept Italy disunited still. 
73 



578 THE NEW WOKLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

The present Kingdom of Italy, twenty-four millions of men, has 
grown out of four millions, and of these fifteen millions were the gift 
of Garibaldi, single-handed. He would never accept mone} r , nor a 
title. They wished to make him Duke of Naples. He preferred, 
instead, to be a simple farmer, upon the Island of Caprera, where he 
has remained with his sons, in virtuous, manual labor, study, and 
thought. 

The appearance of the man is beautiful and simple, like his life. 
He has a pair of soft, kind, brown e3 r es ; his head is a little bald ; a 
gray curling beard encircles his brown face. His dress is quiet, like 
his manner. His home is a rocky island, almost valueless, but by 
his loving consecration. All these Italian patriots are enemies of 
Louis Napoleon. Garibaldi said of him, at Yarignano : — 

64 He has destroyed two republics, — the French and the Roman. 
The third, the Mexican, will repay him for all. There is a God and 
a judgment." 

When Garibaldi was told that Drouyn had been appointed a minis- 
ter, he said : — 

"Of what consequence is it who is the valet? Tell me that 
another man has become the master, and I shall be glad." 

It would be an unpardonable omission to make no biographical 
mention, in this book, of De Tocqueville, whose observations have 
guided us so frequently, and he may be presented as the best type of 
the philosophic, moderate, yet liberal statesman that France or Eu- 
rope can show. 

De Tocqueville was of gentle family, and great grandson of the 
intrepid lawyer who defended Louis XVI., and he inherited fine 
estates in Normandy. In early youth he engaged in politics with 
matchless ardor, and with an ambition the more intense that it was 
absolutely free from the slightest taint of personal interest. He pur- 
sued this noble enterprise for fifteen years, in the contests of Parlia- 
mentary debate, in the parox} r sms of revolution, in the ranks of a 
Constituent Assembly, in the service of the President of the Republic, 
and in the direction of the Department of Foreign Affairs. He 
witnessed the catastrophe which extinguished the liberties of his 
country, and realized the darkest of his own marvellous predictions ; 
but subjection to despotic pow r er wasted him like an incurable dis- 
ease, and amongst the causes which doubtless contributed to exhaust 
his delicate and sensitive frame was the ever-recurring thought that 



POLITICS, ETC., OF TRANCE AND THE CONTINENT. 579 

he who survives the freedom and the dignity of his country has 
already lived too long. 

M. De Tocqueville was not thirty years old when his great work on 
America appeared. He awoke one morning, like Byron^ and found 
himself famous. 

The publication of his last book, in 1856, was followed, in 1857, 
by his last journey to England. The reception he met with here was 
in fact the last triumph of his life. He was received on all sides with 
demonstrations of respect and affection ; and when the time came for 
his return to Normandy, the Lords of the Admiralty, hearing that 
there was no direct steam communication from England to Cherbourg, 
placed a small vessel at his disposal, which landed him within a mile 
or two of his own park. Three years afterwards he died. 

The Free Trade party of France is small but enthusiastic, and 
they have the disadvantages of free traders in all lands, to make 
popular an intricate and statistical subject, to make common people 
think a step further than what is apparent, and to meet the national 
antipathy of France for England, in whose interest, it is argued by 
French protectionists, the advantage of reciprocity would be. The 
most illustrious names amongst French Free Traders, are those of 
Frederick Bastial and Michel Chevalier, the latter still living at the 
age of sixty-three ; he visited the United States under the Orleans 
government, to inquire into our system of canals and railways. He 
is a Professor in the College of France, an anti-Socialist, and an 
Orleanist. Chevalier, and a few other Frenchmen, are favorably 
impressed toward England, and look to it for economical sugges- 
tions. 

The vast questions of continental policy with which the European 
people have to deal have little interested the native American here- 
tofore, yet amongst us are representatives of all these nations, and 
to their kinfolk is due at least some sympathy, and perhaps some 
inquiry. 

We sell much of our crops to those people ; we buy much of one 
sort or another back from them ; we look to them for the grand cara- 
vans of emigration that are to make ports on our eastern slope, and 
States on our western. Also, with or without our will, we are part- 
ners in the topics which arise here. Busied with our vast material 
concerns, we still insensibly derive from Europe the social, refining, 
and intellectual confitures that comfort life, if they do not shape it. 

I have never heard of a man that cracked his head studying Ameri- 



580 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

can politics, until he got to the financial question. But the study 
of Europe, as I have said, is very much like the study of a crab. 
There are so many legs, all moving, and so much hard shell, and 
such an infinity of articulations and spikes, that one does not know 
where to take hold of the creature first. We have a broad zone of 
continent ; its outlines are clear ; we interlap with nobody that we 
fear. How to get money to build our railroads, and how to whip the 
Indians mercifully, are our only unevadable topics. 

But here are eight or nine great races, each of them nearly of the 
size of all our population, interlocked, intersubjugated, cramped, try- 
ing each for itself to get out into comfortable daylight, like so many 
eels out of a box. Then every race wants to get out in its own way ; 
to extend its boundaries according to what it calls the natural law of 
development ; to collect all its natural family, with all their hereditary 
traps and acres, and afterward to rule them all together b}^ one Fed- 
eral will. In this aspiration it surely happens that each race will get 
on the toes and outrage the proprieties of every other race. Geogra- 
phy is too much for them. Upwards of two hundred millions of peo- 
ple, dwelling in a space considerably less than that occupied by our 
thirty-five, will make the most refreshingly incomprehensible wriggle 
and ferment in the world, when they all get going; and this is just 
their present condition. They all have their traditions. They differ 
in religion somewhat ; in temperament vastly more ; in their ideas of 
propriety, reverence, and comfort more than all. Let us see how 
preposterously unlike are some of their claims. 

The farthest off of the great agitations, and one which may yet 
culminate in the earliest crisis, is Pan-Sclavism, or the extrication and 
consolidation of all the Sclave races in one empire. There are in 
Europe eighty millions of Sclaves, half of them in Russia, where they 
are the dominant race; the rest in Austria, Turkey, and Prussia. 
The Czar of Russia is a Sclave ; so are the Poles, the Moravians, the 
Bohemians, and the Servians. They have their poets, and stump- 
speakers, and great literati, and castle-builders, and are all imbued 
with the idea that the time has come to unite and make the great 
Eastern nation of Europe. When you read of revolts in Servia, and 
a dozen other dimly known states in the south of Europe, you may 
set them down to the general insubordination of Pan-Sclavism. In 
the great city of Prague, which is the Philadelphia of Austria, sec- 
ond only to Vienna, the people refuse to hear speeches made in the 
German language. No country but Switzerland has ever been well 



POLITICS, ETC., OF FRANCE AND THE CONTINENT. 581 

governed where there is more than one legal language ; still, the 
Bohemians of Austria, four millions strong, write novels in their own 
Tcheck tongue, and insist upon making the laws in it. To carry out 
the dream of Pan-Slavism would despoil Prussia and totally disrupt 
Austria and Turkey, and bring Russia almost out to tht. Atlantic 
Ocean, or within three hundred miles of France. Western Europe 
would submit to massacre rather than see it ; yet at least ten millions 
of Sclaves are on the verge of revolt for this idea, and you might set 
all the stump-speakers and missionaries and newspapers of the world 
to persuading these that they were unreasonable, to no effect what- 
ever. Again, inside the movement for Pan-Sclavism two or three agi- 
tations for individual territorial empire are afoot. The Poles, who 
are Sclaves, want any alliance but Russia, which is also Sclave. The 
Poles want a republic of aristocrats, to meet on horseback once a 
year in the open air in a vast cavalry legislature, and hoist the ven- 
erable flag of Poland again. The Russians want the Pan-Sclave 
empire to take the name of Russia, and be ruled by the Czar. One 
war of races, and two wars of dominion, lie in the single issue. 

The next great question is that of all Germany, or united u Father- 
land." In the heart of Europe are forty-five millions of Germans. 
They have never had a single nation, though they all speak alike, and 
have the same literature. For seventy years they have all sung songs, 
declaring that they would be one people. Now, they swear that this 
grand consolidation shall be deferred no longer. Encouraged by the 
victories of Prussia, they declare that there shall be no exception to 
a total blending of all the German provinces. • 

When this shall happen, there will be a nation close beside France 
fifteen millions stronger than she. Away will go France's supremacy 
in the affairs of Europe. She will have no influence as in the past 
over this divided family, and possibly will have to give up the city 
of Strasburg, and provinces on the Rhine that she has held more than 
a century. Sooner than do this every Frenchman will die on the 
Rhine, or across it. It was the cry of " Faderland '" that robbed 
Denmark of Schleswig, four years ago. The same idea threatens to 
absorb Holland. It might even disrupt Switzerland, and put Prussia 
along the line of the Alps, neighbor to Italy, for half the Swiss are 
Germans. Yet the Germans everywhere are arming for this idea. 
There are three millions of needle-guns ready for the war to-day ; a 
million of Chassepot rifles, and no end of infernally ingenious artil- 



532 THE NEW WOKLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

lery. The Pan-German empire would take the city of Vienna out of 
Austria, and make Amsterdam a port of Berlin. 

" " Italy shall be free," is only another way of saying that all Italian 
people shall subscribe to one government. The exceptions to a 
united Italy at present are the city and small environing state of 
Rome, the Istrian coast, and the city of Trieste, which are Italian 
in blood and language, and the mountain region north of Venice as 
far as the Tyrol. It is Roman territory, however, that the Italians 
first demand, on grounds of tradition as well as of policy. Rome is in 
tradition, more than all Italy besides ; it was once the world. The 
Italians feel that they have no natural or consecrated capital without 
it. The Roman people are continually crying: " Brethren, come 
over and deliver us from these mercenary soldiers ! " and the Roman 
ecclesiastical government is, besides, an intestine enemy to the unity 
of Italy. 

Italy could do without Rome if she could do without memory and 
heart. And it would not be an arduous task to overrun all the State 
of the Church, but unfortunately, the question of religion is a concern 
of government in Europe. Nearly all the sovereigns hold title from 
the Pope. One is " Most Catholic Majesty ; " another, " Holy Apos- 
tolic Majesty ; " a third, u Defender of the Faith ; " and another, 
" Eldest Son of the Church." Napoleon was married by the Pope in 
person. Francis Joseph of Austria owes many a good turn in land 
and matrimony to the same pontiff. Spain is attached to this century 
only by the lessening link of the Church. Each of these powers 
would go»to war with Italy in the Pope's behalf. Besides, the con- 
servative sentiment of Europe is*against Italy in this matter; Kings 
and Princes somehow feel that when the ancient Church goes down, 
reverence for more worldly titles will lessen. Kings are also as 
superstitious as anybody, and, having very little idea of getting to 
heaven on their own merits, prefer not to strike the onty man on 
earth who keeps a passport office. Napoleon is, like all French 
sovereigns who have lived before him, the worst enemy of Italy, 
because her ally. If his son should die — and he will never have 
another — Prince Napoleon would be Emperor, and Prince Napoleon 
is son-in-law to the King of Italy. Therefore King Victor Emmanuel 
dare not go to war with the Pope, and offend his strong kins- 
man. 

The Italians have great expectations of their town, Brindisi, which 
will be, as in the Crusades, the place of debarkation for Suez and the 



POLITICS, ETC., OF FRANCE AND THE CONTINENT. 583 

East, after the completion of the Alpine tunnel. Brindisi is six hun- 
dred miles nearer Suez than is Marseilles. The Alpine tunnel is to 
be more than seven and a half miles long. 

By Pan-Hellenism I express the aspiration of all the Christian 
people east of Italy and south of Austria, for independence. The 
war in Crete was an exhibition of Pan-Hellenism. About four hun- 
dred 3'ears ago the Turks first got into Europe, nearly at the time 
that Columbus got into America. They conquered all of what is now 
Turkey in Europe, and Greece, and the outlying islands, and estab- 
lished among Christian people their intolerant and almost barbarous 
worship and government. For four hundred years the people revolted 
and submitted alternately. At last Greece was made free ; but the 
big powers, like England, were afraid to give her much territory, as 
she was a first-class commercial country, and might like to adopt a 
republican form of government. Therefore they saddled upon her 
a little German prince, made her pride of state wretched, and ever 
since have propped up the sick Turk, to the disgrace of Christianity 
and humanity. 

A large proportion of the people of Turkey, all the Greeks, Cretans, 
and other islanders are Greek Christians, which is one of the three great 
Christian families. They want to build up the Christian Confedera- 
tion of Greece, to include the whole of Turkey, and drive the Turk 
into Asia again. In this desire they have only two friends. Russia 
and the United States ; because the Catholic powers have no more 
sympathy with the Greek Church than with the Mohammedan. The 
Russian royal family invariably intermarry with Protestant Princes. 
It is for this Pan-Hellenic idea that all south-eastern Europe is in 
ferment, and on this question all Europe may be involved in war. 
Western Europe fears, in the expulsion of the Turk, the advance of 
Russia to the Mediterranean. France, England, Italy, Turkey, and 
Spain would probably meet in this issue Russia, Prussia, Austria, and 
Greece. 

All the great peoples of Europe are curiously interested and 
amazed in the rise of America, and their rulers at present compete 
for our friendship. " Europe/' said the Prince Talleyrand, long ago, 
"must have an eye on America, and take care not to offer any pre- 
text for recrimination or retaliation. America is growing every day. 
She will become a colossal power, and the time will arrive when (dis- 
coveries enabling her to communicate more easily with Europe) she 
will want to say a word on our affairs, and have a hand in them. 



584 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

Political wisdom requires therefore of the government of the old 
continent to exercise the most scrupulous care lest any pretext be 
given for any such intervention. When America acquires a foothold 
in Europe, it would be all over with peace and security for a long 
time." 

I close this chapter with an entertaining account of the greatest of 
French Republicans at home, General Lafayette, as described by 
William H. Seward, then (1833) a correspondent of the " Albany 
Evening Journal." The sketch will serve to illustrate the character 
of a pure Franco- American republican, and also to illustrate the 
household life of a French nobleman. 

"We were met," says Mr. Seward, "by a servant of Gen. Lafay- 
ette who waited with a plain, neat coach, to carry us to LaGrange, his 
estate. We entered the domain as soon as we left the village, and a ride 
of something more than half a mile brought us to a grove, so rich and 
dense as to exclude the chateau from view. A winding of the road 
now discovered to us a venerable castle, built of stone, on the three 
sides of a square with an open court in the centre. The chateau is 
three stories in height, and at each angle is flanked by a circular tower. 
It is surrounded by a moat or canal filled with water, and traversed 
by bridges. An ivy clusters upon its front wall, which was planted 
by Charles James Fox. The coach stopped in the paved court, at 
the entrance of the chateau. We entered a large hall containing a 
grand staircase in the centre. At the foot of the stairs were two 
small brass cannon, mounted, and facing each entrance. The cannon 
bore inscriptions, stating that they were captured from the royal 
troops by the people of Paris in the revolution of the three days, and 
presented to Gen. Lafayette. Over them, and in front of the ascent 
of the stairs, is a triumphal ornament composed of flags taken from 
the royal troops in the same revolution. At the top of the staircase 
is an ornament, not less appropriate and . characteristic ; it is formed 
of the graceful foldings of our own standard, with its stars and 
stripes. We were received by Madame Maubourg, the General's 
oldest daughter, and by two of his grandsons. The lady spoke to us 
in English, but, being unaccustomed to the language in ordinary 
conversation, she found it so difficult that she gave me to understand 
we must use my bad French instead of her difficult English. She is 
a middle-aged woman, plainly dressed, exceedingly well-informed, 
vivacious, and agreeable. In half an hour the General appeared, 



POLITICS, ETC., OF FRANCE AND THE CONTINENT. 585 

well, cheerful, and animated, and we passed an hour in conversation 
upon French and English politics. The apartment which is the 
common parlor is still more plainly furnished than the rooms in the 
General's house in town. The floor is of polished oak. The room 
contains a bust of Washington at the age of fifty-eight, and portraits 
of all the Presidents of the United States except the present incum- 
bent (Jackson). The General informed us that one of the latter 
had been forwarded by his friends in America, but had been lost 
on the way ; he had written for another, but it was not yet received. 

"In the course of the morning (afternoon) the several members of 
the family appeared, and warmly welcomed us to La Grange. The 
conversation was redundant in incidents of the Revolution. The Gen- 
eral alluded to the difficulty he encountered in learning the English 
language, so as to pronounce it well, saying, that soon after he joined 
the American army he was requested to name the watchword for the 
day. He gave " Paris." He was himself challenged by an Ameri- 
can sentinel, and pronounced a spy, because he pronounced the pass- 
word Pa-re. He alluded to Col. Burr's visit to France ; said he did 
not visit the colonel at Paris, — he could not — he had recently killed 
one of his friends (Hamilton), and conspired against another (Jeffer- 
son). I mention this as an evidence of the Catholicism of the Gener- 
al's attachment to America, which embraced these two rival politi- 
cians, and widely opposed statesmen, without marking by a single 
expression his consciousness of their mutual opposition to each 
other. After sitting two hours, the General called a domestic, and 

proceeded to show us to our rooms. The one prepared for S was 

in the first story, comfortably warmed, in consideration of his ill 
health.- He conducted me through long winding corridors of brick 
pavement, to the tower in the angle of the chateau in the third story, 
saying, ' You see, sir, that this is a very old house.' But although 
it was old, it was, in all that concerned the comfort of guests, per- 
fectly an fait. ; We dine,' said the general, ' at half-past six. Here are 
paper and materials for writing. My library is on this floor ; if you 
want anything, you will ring for a servant.' I wanted no books. I 
was reading the choicest histor}' and character from the lips of La- 
fayette himself, and husbanded my time so as to lose nothing of the 
precious treasure. He spoke again in our interview this afternoon, 
and very freely of Louis Philippe ; said that he distinctly engaged 
to him, that the new monarchy should be surrounded by republican 
institutions, to be of temporary duration, and to prepare the way for 
U 



586 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

a republic ; but he had a chosen to build up a dynasty, and had made 
a bad choice. c Had he fulfilled his engagements/ said Lafayette, 
' he might have been King twenty-five years ; but to secure the sup- 
port promised him by the other powers of Europe, he preferred build- 
ing up his own dynasty, to make it perpetual. In the former case, 
the great revolution of France would have ended in four acts. Now 
it would be five. The people would be educated and prepared for a 
republic in twenty } r ears. When that time should come France would 
not be content to be governed by kings. Louis Philippe and his 
family were sure to come down some time, and that not distant ; he 
(Lafayette) did not think they had twenty years to reign. 

" One cannot be an hour at La Grange, without discovering that 
Lafayette and his family are all American in their attachments and 
feelings. The conversation is animated beyond measure when it 
turns upon American affairs, reminiscences, anticipations, and hopes. 
The drawing-room is adorned w r ith pictures of the American Presi- 
dents ; the grand staircase with the American flag ; the antechamber 
with busts of Washington and Franklin, and American maps. The 
library contains a choice collection of American books, and the sleep- 
ing-rooms have no pictures but those of American battle-fields, naval 
victories, landscapes, Mount Vernon, Hancock's house, Quincy, etc., 
etc. Would there were among American statesmen such lofty and 
exclusive devotion to the republic ! At the dinner hour we met the 
entire family, consisting of twenty-two persons. The dining-room 
was a large and plain apartment on the ground floor. The General 
occupied the centre ; on his right, Madame Maubourg, at the upper 
end of the table, and Madame Perier at the other end of the table. 
The dinner was served with a degree of republican simplicity which 
would shame our dinners in our cities. The viands were good, and 
the wine abundant ; all, with the exception of a bottle of cham- 
pagne, and a bottle of Madeira, the produce of La Grange. The 
General told many anecdotes of his tour in the United States, and 
expatiated upon the different parts of the Union. That spot, of all 
others, which he most admired, was Goat Island, at Niagara Falls. 
He described its beauties to his family, and said that he never thought 
of it, without feeling a desire to purchase it, and make it his resi- 
dence. Madame Maubourg, by whose side I had the honor to be 
seated, interested me exceedingly. She described to me the Castle 
of Olmutz, and her stay there with her mother and sister during the 
imprisonment of her father, and I felt that I had not now a wish 



POLITICS, ETC., OF FRANCE AND THE CONTINENT. 537 

ungratified, since I had seen the hero, and the survivors of the 
three heroines of that dungeon. 4 1 will subscribe/ said Lafayette 
to the agent of the Prussian government, who proposed to him a 
renunciation of his republican principles, as a condition for his re- 
lease, * I will subscribe no declaration inconsistent with my duties as 
an American citizen.' Such was his language forty years ago, when 
the American Republic was in its infancy. ' I will not support/ 
said he, in 1830, ' a government which is inconsistent with my princi- 
ples as an American citizen/ Was ever human character, through 
all vicissitudes, so consistent as that of Lafayette ? Madame Mau- 
bourg said that the most sincere and unmingled pleasure she had ever 
enjoyed was in reading the American newspapers which recorded her 
father's arrival and progress through the United States. It was the 
triumph, the reward, the crown of a life of sacrifices, perils, and suf- 
ferings in the cause of human freedom. 

" The General's tour was spoken of with no more apparent self-com- 
placency than if it had been a ride in his little glass coach from La 
Grange to Paris, and the revolution of the three days w r as treated with 
no more effort at effect than if it had been an election of a Congress- 
man in our own country. The party (rather the family) remained at 
the table about an hour and a half, and then retired to the drawing- 
room, where the evening was spent in free and unrestrained conversa- 
tion. The ladies, as if they were the females of a farmer's family, had 
their sewing and knitting-work ; the elder being employed principally 
in the homely operation of mending, with conversation upon books 
and music and the newspapers, which were by turns resorted to. At 
precisely ten o'clock each of the younger members of the party sa- 
luted the General, who retired upon taking leave of us for the night, 
and saying to us that we should take breakfast at ten o'clock. 

" The General said he rose every morning at six, and I found all 
the gentlemen had been abroad over the plantation. From breakfast 
the ladies retired to the shade-trees on the lawn in front of the chateau. 
Mademoiselle Clementine, the daughter of George Lafayette, and an 
adopted daughter of the General, accompanied us in a long walk over 
the grounds, until we reached a small artificial lake, containing several 
islands planted with evergreens. 

" On our return to the chateau we found the General waiting for 
us. He first exhibited to us the beautiful barge which had been pre- 
sented to him by the "Whitehall boatmen, after they had won the boat 
race against the Thames barge. He has built a house over it, with 



588 THE NEW WOULD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

a substantial tiled roof, and enclosed by a network of iron which ex- 
cludes it even from the touch. He next walked with us through every 
department of his farming affairs, which were in the most perfect 
order. He showed an entire familiarity with the whole, and is pas- 
sionately fond of the pursuit. His horses, cattle, sheep, and swine 
were all housed and taken care of in the most systematic manner. I 
could not but mark the economy which prevailed. Even the acorns 
were all hoarded as food for the swine. The farm attached to the 
chateau contains about eight hundred acres. Besides this, he has 
another and larger farm in the south of France. George Washington 
Lafayette resides there during the summer and takes charge of it. 
The care of La Grange is intrusted to one superintendent. Regular 
daily accounts are kept, and these are carefully posted and examined 
every Saturday. A portion of the concern, such as the dairy, etc., 
and the use of what is required in the family, is subject to the super- 
vision of his daughters. I was struck by the homage paid him by 
every domestic and laborer. It was merited, for his manner toward 
them was parental. 

" At dinner he descanted to his family in glowing terms upon the 
homage universally exhibited in America to the soldiers of the Revo- 
lution, as witnessed by him on public occasions. 

44 On parting with the General, I said to him that we had a long 
time anticipated his return to America to spend the evening of his 
days there. ' My dear sir,' replied he, ' I should be very sorry to 
think that I shall never see America, but you know how it is. I am 
confined to France for two or three years to come by my office, as a 
member of the House of Deputies, and what may happen within that 
time God only knows.' " 




REPRESENTATIVE HOMES OF CITIZENS. 

1— Palace of the Prince of Prussia. 2— Duke of Wellington's Home. 

3 — Chateau of Duke de Lynnes, France. 4 — Residence of A. T. 

Stewart, New York. 5 — Home of Bayard Taylor. 



CHAPTER XXII. 

A GENERAL VIEW OF CONTINENTAL FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT. 

The nations of Europe paragraphed, with particular accounts of the salaries of sovereigns, 
and sketches of diplomatic life, and biography. 

To institute a comparison between Europe and America, geograph- 
ically, would be for the sake of familiar illustration, rather than to 
prove any definite resemblance. Both continents face upon the At- 
lantic, and as we recede from the sea into each we approach, at oppo- 
site points of the compass, the frontiers. Eussia is the Great West 
of Europe, stretching to its Eocky Mountains, vast, rolling, cold. 
The Mediterranean is its Mexican Gulf; Spain is an exaggerated 
Florida, projecting into the sea ; the Baltic is the Great Lakes ; the 
Danube is the European Ohio Eiver, and the Valley of the Black Sea 
is the Mississippi Valley ; the Ehine is the Susquehanna of Europe ; 
the Alps are its Alleghanies, in which are the sources of the greater 
streams ; Paris is New York, and Great Britain is New England. 
Chicago becomes Dantzic ; St. Petersburg, Milwaukee ; Odessa, Gal- 
veston ; Constantinople, New Orleans ; Venice, Mobile ; Lyons, 
Philadelphia ; Copenhagen, Buffalo ; Vienna, Cincinnati. The most 
highly civilized regions are on the ocean ; the most growing, formi- 
dable, and warlike, near the frontiers ; grain and kine come from the 
plains of Eussia, as from the prairies of America ; fruit and manu- 
factures from the valleys of the Atlantic. Three interior cities com- 
pete with jealousy for precedence : Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis, 
— St. Petersburg, Berlin, Vienna. The money is in the cities by the 
sea ; the energy of improvements, in the far interior ; but there is no 
vast emigration to the interior of Europe, as to the interior of Amer- 
ica, unless it shall hereafter come from Asia. 

Let us pass in review the most characteristic governments of 
Europe. 

The Emperor of Eussia, past fifty years of age, had for a mother, 
a Prussian Princess, and his wife is a daughter of the Grand Duke 
of the semi-extinct State of Darmstadt. He belongs to the House of 

589 



590 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

Romanof, and he is almost completely Teutonic in blood and origin. 
The Emperor's lands, forests, and salary, amount altogether to twenty- 
eight million five hundred thousand dollars a year. His direct 
income from the state is about eight million dollars annually. There 
are four million Protestants in Russia, but the Jews are excluded. 
Finland and Poland have partially independent governments. In 
Russia there is an extraordinary mixture of liberalism and despotism, 
the ballot and the ukase, so that the mighty empire, which comprises 
one-seventh of the territory of the globe, is really the most imper- 
fect, and the most colossal of civilized states, deriving the most 
philosophical of its notions from the Germans, its financial theories 
from the French and Dutch, and its military spirit from its own 
Tartars. 

The Government of Russia is an absolute hereditary monarchy. 
The whole Legislative, Executive, and Judicial power is united in 
the Emperor, whose will alone is law. There are, however, certain 
rules of government which the Sovereigns of the House of Holstein- 
Gottorp have acknowledged as binding. The chief of these is the 
law of succession to the throne. Another fundamental law of the 
realm, proclaimed by Peter I., is that every sovereign of Russia, with 
his consort and children, must be a member of the Orthodox Greek 
Church. The Princes and Princesses of the Imperial House, accord- 
ing to a decree of Alexander I., must obtain the consent of the 
Emperor to any marriage they may contract ; otherwise the issue of 
such union cannot inherit the throne. 

The administration of the empire is entrusted to four great boards, 
or councils, possessing separate functions, but centring in the 
" Private Cabinet of the Emperor." The first of these Boards is the 
Council of the Empire. The second is the Directing Senate. The 
third College is the Holy Synod. The fourth Board of Government 
is the Council of Ministers. The latter is divided into twelve depart- 
ments, as follows : — 

The Ministry of the Imperial House. 

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 

The Ministry of War. 

The Ministry of the Navy. 

The Ministry of the Interior. 

The Ministry of Public Instruction. 

The Ministry of Finance. 

The Ministry of Justice. 

The Ministry of the Imperial Domains. 



CONTINENTAL FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT. 591 

The Ministry of Public Works. 

The General Post Office. 

The Department of General Comptrol. 

The Emperor of Austria belongs to the House of Hapsburg, which 
intermarried with the House of Lorraine in France. Napoleon com- 
pelled this house to renounce the Imperial Crown of Germany, and 
in 1804 its heir assumed the name of Emperor, or Kaiser, of Austria ; 
the heir of the present Emperor is eleven years old, and his mother 
is a Bavarian. The Empire consists of a German Monarchy, and a 
Hungarian Kingdom, each possessing its own laws, parliament, and 
ministers ; in the German Monarchy there are fourteen Provincial 
Congresses (Diets), partly clerical and aristocratic, and partly popu- 
lar, while at Vienna there is a Central Diet (Reichsrath), consisting 
of a House of Nobles, and Clergy, and a Lower House elected by the 
fourteen Provincial Diets. In Austria the Catholics outnumber the 
Greeks, Jews, and Protestants, nearly two to one ; one of the Catho- 
lic Archbishops receives sixty-three thousand dollars a year. The 
Austrian Government pays eight per cent, for its later loans ; the 
navy of the state carries less than one thousand guns. Austria is 
now a constitutional government, forced to become so by the deserved 
misfortunes of its rulers, and at the head of its statesmen is Baron 
Von Buest, a Saxon, and the enemy of Bismarck, who was received 
by the Emperor of Austria, after Bismarck had almost annihilated 
him, and now displays his diplomatic abilities at the head of the 
second state in Germany. Both Buest and Bismarck were aristo- 
crats, with little love of the people ; but both have been forced by 
different fortunes to help the popular cause. 

The North German Confederation, of which Prussia is the bulk, is 
composed of about twent}^ states, exclusive of those which Prussia 
absorbed, which have formed themselves into an " eternal union," 
whereof the King of Prussia declares war, concludes peace, and ap- 
points ambassadors ; he commands besides all the naval forces, and 
the military rules of his kingdom extend to the whole federation. 
The King of Prussia, who represents North Germany, belongs to the 
House of Hohenzollern ; so called for a family castle, near the Danube. 
The first King of Prussia was crowned seventy-five years before the 
American Declaration of Independence ; the early rulers of Prussia 
saved their money, and Frederick the Great used it to enlarge his 
state by war. Since the war of 1866, Prussia contains a population 
of twenty-three millions. The King receives about two million five 



592 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

hundred thousand dollars a year. The heir to the Prussian Crown is 
now nearly forty years old, and his wife is a daughter of Queen Vic- 
toria. The Prussian Legislature is composed of a House of Lords 
and a Chamber of Deputies, and the government is partly Parliament- 
ary like that of England, while in parts it resembles the arbitrary 
government of Louis Napoleon. There are ten members of the 
Prussian Cabinet ; every province of the kingdom has a Governor, 
with a salary of forty-three hundred dollars per annum. The royal 
family belongs to the Calvinistic Church. The Navy carries less 
than six hundred guns, and is manned by less than four thousand 
conscripted sailors and marines ; the biggest ship (1867) in the Prus- 
sian Navy carries sixteen guns of seven tons each, but many iron- 
clad vessels of greater power and armament have since been built for 
Prussia by the English. 

Count Otto Von Bismarck, who, next to Frederick the Great, has 
been the greatest aggrandizer of Prussia, is Minister of Foreign 
Affairs ; he is fifty-six years, old, well educated and despotic ; but 
the latter part of his life has been marked by respect for popular 
rights, and by enormous devotion to the interests of Prussia. In 
1869, Bismarck presented his budget, and replying to the strictures 
of Doctor Lowe, a Republican, he made a speech from which we glean 
a paragraph to show the good-humor, and the style of speaking of the 
great Prussian Premier : — 

" The last speaker appears to have been pretty sharply cut by what 
I said yesterday about eloquence. [Laughter.] He draws upon his 
imagination to find expressions that never fell from my lips. My 
whole life shows that I intend to adhere to a strictly parliamentary 
system. To prevent parliamentary power from becoming too strong 
does not mean to contest it. We would bring upon us the dangers 
of dilletanteism in politics if the strong overbalancing power lay in 
the parliamentary assembly, as it certainly is not at present. This 
speaker left the stand with his ceterum censeo against the army 
budget. I would venture to go surety for the security of the state, 
according to his meaning, if a victorious arm\ could be held at bay 
on the borders of a state through the power of eloquence. [Laughter.] 
The history of Rome tells us of a case in which the enemy was kept 
off by the mere power of eloquence ; but this enemy was composed 
of very uneducated people. [Great laughter.] " 

The King of the Netherlands belongs to the House of Orange- 
Nassau, and his mother was the daughter of a Czar of Russia ; he 



CONTINENTAL FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT. 593 

married a daughter of the King of Wurtemberg, and his son, the 
heir, is an Admiral in the Dutch Navy. The King receives two hun- 
dred and fifty thousand dollars a year, and the rest of the royal family 
receive one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars collectively 
every year. The private fortune of the royal house amounts to about 
ten million dollars, which was amassed by the grandfather of the 
present King in mercantile speculations ; the present King's uncle con- 
tinues these speculations, and is even richer than the King. The 
Senate of the Netherlands consists of thirty-nine members, elected 
by the Provincial Legislatures from among the largest tax-pa} T ers ; 
the House of Representatives consists of seventy-two paid members 
elected, by ballot, from those who pay taxes amounting to fifty dollars 
per year. There are seven ministers in the Cabinet, each receiving 
one thousand dollars per annum. The government is closely mod- 
elled after that of England. There are nearly sixty thousand men in 
the Army, and nearly one thousand guns in the Navy. The government 
clears about two million dollars a year from its colonies, but makes 
little or nothing upon its American colonies. 

Switzerland is a United Confederacy, made so by a civil war of 
1848. It has no Executive, strictly speaking, but both legislative 
and executive authority is vested in a State Council, and a Federal 
Council (Nationale Bath), the first of forty-four members, chosen by 
the twenty-two Cantons of the Republic, the second, chosen in direct 
election by all the citizens ; the United Chambers are called the Fed- • 
eral Assembly, a committee of which represents the Supreme Govern- 
ment ; the President and Vice-President of this Committee of Seven 
are the first magistrates of the Republic ; they serve for one year for 
two thousand dollars, and one thousand seven hundred dollars, respec- 
tively. There is also a Federal tribunal, which is a High Court of 
Appeal, and arbitrates between the Cantons. Switzerland presents 
the anomaly of a state, where Protestants and Catholics are nearly 
equally divided, and only the baneful order of Jesuits is excluded, a 
complete toleration prevailing. The revenue of the state is upwards 
of five million dollars, and the expenditure little more than four mil- 
lion dollars (1863) ; the Republic had a surplus of assets in 1861 of 
nearly two million dollars. An honorable instance of Swiss patriot- 
ism is that of the purchase by the nation of the estate of Grutli for 
eleven thousand dollars. Grutli is the spot on Lucerne Lake where 
the Swiss patriots swore to free their country from Austrian rule ; to 
prevent its falling into the hands of a speculative hotel company, the 
75 



594 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

people, by subscription, bought it and gave it to the nation. There 
is no standing army in Switzerland, but every man must bear arms 
when called upon ; and in 1862 there were three hundred and forty 
thousand men ready to send out, or ten times the standing army of 
the United States. Out of two million five hundred and thirty-four 
thousand five hundred and forty-two inhabitants, less than one-fifth 
are without land ; there are eight hundred and twenty miles of rail- 
road in Switzerland. 

The King of Italy, Victor Emmanuel II., is nearly fifty years old, 
and is an elective King, the son of one Austrian Archduchess, and the 
husband of another ; one of his daughters is married to Prince Napo- 
leon, and another to the King of Portugal ; his heir is twenty-seven 
years old, a Major-General, and the origin of the House is a German 
Count, who, in the eleventh century, established himself at the foot 
of the Alps. In 1864, the King gave up six hundred thousand dol- 
lars of his income to the almost bankrupt country, and he contents 
himself with about one million seven hundred thousand dollars, while 
several of his relatives receive smaller sums. He has nine ministers. 
The Roman Catholic is the established religion, with forty-five Arch- 
bishops and one hundred and ninety-eight Bishops. There are sixty- 
five provinces in Italy. The government is a moderated form of the 
French Empire, with certain English adaptations attached to it. Not 
only are all worships tolerated in Italy, but the bloated estates of 
priests have been confiscated to support public education, and to help 
the thirteen National Universities. The Italian Navy consisted 
(1866) of one hundred and six war vessels, carrying one thousand 
four hundred and sixty-eight guns. By the last census, Italy, as a 
kingdom, contains nearly twenty-two millions of people ; there are 
nearly four hundred newspapers in the nation, and a sea-faring popu- 
lation of one hundred and sixty thousand, capable of making a 
greater navy than Austria and Prussia combined. 

The Pope of Rome has an income from his own little state of 
655,000 dollars a year ; but contributions from abroad sw T ell it to 
5,000,000 dollars. A Pope is elected by the ballot of Cardinals, 
each Cardinal writing his own name and that of his candidate 
on a ticket, every Cardinal saying a prayer as he votes. The 
present is the two hundred and fifty-eighth Pope. The present 
Pope is sevent} r -seven years old ; he has six ministers, at the head of 
which is Antonelli, the son of a wood-cutter, — a man of bad family, 
the most hated of all the parasites of European despots, and who is 



CONTINENTAL FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT. 595 

believed to have gained immense riches by filching the revenues of the 
mendicant Pope. The Pope is absolute, irresponsible, and infallible, 
never seeking advice but from his college of less than fifty Cardinals, 
all but thirteen of whom are Italians and Princes of the Church. 
The Pope expended in 1864, as in most other years, three times his 
income, and he is in debt in eveiy part of the world ; yet he kept, in 
1860, twent} T -five thousand soldiers, upon less than seven hundred 
thousand inhabitants. There are only eighty-four miles of railroad 
in his state, which generally loses money, and the Jesuits seem to have 
mastered the old man. The Jesuits numbered, in 1863, seven thou- 
sand five hundred and twenty-nine, the majority of whom were in 
France, while three hundred and fifty were in America. The Pope's 
winter palace, called the Vatican, contains four thousand four hun- 
dred and twenty-two rooms, and is one thousand one hundred and 
fifty-one feet long, and seven hundred and sixty-seven broad ; his 
principal church (St. Peter's) cost fifty million dollars, covers eight 
acres, and required three hundred and fifty years to build and finish it. 

The King of Portugal receives 410,000 dollars a year, of which he 
returns nearly 100,000 dollars to the educational bureau ; «but his 
court costs the state 760,000 dollars annually. 

The Sultan of Turkey is said to receive 48,000,000 dollars a year, or 
three-fourths the whole revenue of his dominions ; his Grand Vizier 
gets 65,000 dollars annually, and his ministers from 50,000 dollars to 
41,000 dollars each, a year. 

The King of the little State of Greece gets 274,000 dollars a year, 
in addition to 60,000 dollars from other sources. 

The Grand Duke of Baden receives 313,000 dollars a year for him- 
self and family. 

The King of Wurtemburg receives 370,000 dollars a year. 

Bavaria has the most aristocratic army, in officers, in Europe, and 
its King receives for himself and family 1,250,000 dollars a year. 
King Ludwig stole besides, from the public exchequer, nearly 640,000 
dollars to support Lola Montez and his other mistresses, which sum he 
was obliged to return from his private purse, under threat of revolution. 
The Catholic Church in Bavaria is endowed with 42,000,000 dollars' 
worth of property. 

The Prince of Schwarzburg Rudolstadt, with 72,000 subjects, has 
60,000 dollars a year salary, exclusive of real estate revenues ; the 
Prince of Schwarzburg Sondershausen, with 65,000 people, has 
112,000 dollars a year, or one-fourth the revenue of the country be- 



596 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

sides the revenue of immense private estates derived from his pre- 
decessor, who insisted upon brewing and selling all the beer in his 
dominions. 

The Prince of Eeuss-Schleiz, with 83,000 people, receives 100,000 
dollars a year, and owns almost his entire state. 

The Prince of Schaumburg-Lippe, with 31,000 people, has 125,000 
dollars a year, and his crown domains are mortgaged to the amount 
of 2,500,000 dollars. 

The most starveling and pitiable Prince of Lippe-Detmold, with 
108,000 people, who was obliged to sell part of his territory to 
Prussia, gets 50,000 dollars a year. 

The Prince of Waldeck, whose ancestors sold 1,225 of his subjects 
to England to subdue America, three-fourths of whom never returned, 
has 58,000 subjects, and 186,000 dollars yearly salary, yet he is so 
poor that he must keep gaming-tables and sell mineral waters. 

The Duke of Saxe-Altenburg, with 138,000 people, gets 108,000 
dollars a year. 

The Duke of Saxe-Cbburg-Grotha, brother of Prince Albert of Eng- 
land, has 160,000 subjects, and about 80,000 dollars a year 
salary. 

The Duke Anhalt, with 182,000 people, gets 150,000 dollars a year, 
and owns private estates, in various parts of the world, of more than 
200 square miles of land ; these miserable Princes, in anticipation of 
being driven out to grass, have managed to sweat, to steal, and to pick 
from their subjects large sums of money to lay up nest-eggs in 
foreign parts. A poor Prince was never known to escape from his 
country ; a rich Republican exile has never been seen. While 
Joseph Bonaparte lived at Bordentown upon a vast estate, Moreau, 
the French Republican, and victor of Hohenlinden, lived opposite 
Trenton in a cottage, just able to find his bread. When Prince Albert 
married the Queen of England, with true German princely thrift, he 
made the first demand upon Parliament for a large annuity, and 
spent his married life in laying up the ingots for future use. 

The Duke of Saxe-Weimer gets, out of his 278,000 people, 
thousands of whom are coming to America, 205,000 dollars a 
year. 

The Duke Saxe-Meningen gets 94,000 dollars a year. 

The Duke of Mecklenberg-Strelitz, with 98,000 people, gets the 
enormous sum of 1,110,000 dollars a year, or seventy dollars for 
every soul, and while on the one hand he is losing a thousand people a 



CONTINENTAL FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT. 597 

year bound to America, on the other he is selling parcels of his prop- 
erty to Prussia. 

The Duke of Brunswick, who was driven out of his little realm by 
a riot in 1830, took with him enough extorted money to live in Paris 
at the rate of 1,000,000 dollars a year, while the present Duke gets 
175,000 dollars annually out of 282,000 people ; in 1850 one-fifth of 
all the births in his duchy were illegitimate. 

The Duke of Oldenburg, with 295,000 people, receives 156,000 
dollars a year. 

The Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, who claims to be the only 
reigning family in Europe of Sclavonic origin, and to be the oldest 
sovereign house in the Western World, and who calls himself Prince 
of the Vandals, supports a feudal state of 550,000 people, has a 
salary of 600,000 dollars a year, owns a railroad fifty-five miles long, 
and his estates comprise one-fifth of his realm, and are worth 
60,000,000 dollars. - In 1860 one child out of every three and eight- 
tenths in his domains was illegitimate ; only one-half his people 
can read, and his government imposes restrictions upon marriage, 
so that he is indeed King of the Vandals ! In 1864 his Diet passed 
a law investing all landed proprietors with power to condemn their 
laborers, for simple " neglect of service, " to a week's imprisonment, 
and twenty-five blows with a stick. In one district of Hesse-Cassel 
young girls were, until a recent period, shipped to England, to be 
sold into infamy for the price of an export duty. 

The King of Saxony receives 640,000 dollars a year, out of 
2,225,000 population. 

The King of Denmark gets 350,000 dollars a year, and his heir 
14,000 dollars, levied on 1,608,000 people. 

The King of Belgium receives for himself 550,000 dollars annually, 
and, including the expenses of his court, 840,000 dollars. 

Such are some of the monstrous figures which are paid to the 
Sovereigns of Europe, and in view of these we are seriously advised 
by certain adventurers that Imperialism is the panacea for all the 
errors of a Republican people. The combined scandals of every Re- 
publican administration, from the days of Washington to the present 
time, will not match the vices of one generation of some of the 
pettiest ducal houses of Europe. In 1869 the banished King of 
Hanover was driven by the Prussians to Vienna ; but though banished 
he was not beggared, for he and his ancestors had put by certain 
little morsels for rainy days, and from all these sources the bereaved 



598 THE NEW-EWORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

monarch has a little competence, of which no one can deprive him, of 
about 1,500,000 dollars per annum. 

Some time ago, before one of the chancery courts in London, a suit 
in which the King of Holland was plaintiff, and the Bank of England 
defendant, was heard and decided. It was a demand for a little sum 
of 3,000,000 dollars. 

In the year 1783 a large sum was realized out of the revenues of 
the then Electorate of Hanover, which George III. invested in bank 
annuities. It now amounts to 3,000,000 dollars in gold, and was 
specifically designed to cover the exigencies of the King and Queen 
of Hanover, as well as the minor princes and princesses. In 1867 
the King of Prussia protested against this sum being paid to the 
King of Hanover ; but the English courts decided it to be his prop- 
erty. 

The following were the amounts of the principals of the national 
debts of the great states of Christendom, in 1867 : — 

Great Britain and Ireland, .... $3,907,500,000 

United States, 2,775,000,000 

France, 2,700,000,000 

Russia, 1,325,000,000 

Austria, 1,250,000/000 

Italy, 1,180,000,000 

Spain, 800,000,000 

Holland, 425,000,000 

Turkey, 350,000,000 

Prussia, 295,000,000 

Portugal, 235,000,000 

Bavaria, 250,000,000 

Belgium, 140,000,000 

Brazil, 120,000,000 

Peru, 108,000,000 

Victoria, South Australia, New South Wales, 

Queensland, ...... 86,000,000 

Denmark, 75,000,000 

Canada, 75,000,000 

Sweden, 33,000,000 

Norway, 7,500,000 

Chili, . 18,000,000 

Argentine Republic, 25,000,000 

Switzerland, 800,000 

The following are the amounts of annual interest on the debts of a 
few of the principal states (1867). 



CONTINENTAL FINANCE AND GOVEKNMENT. 



599 



United States, 


• 












$140,000,000 


Great Britain and Ireland, , 






. , 




■ . iao,ooo,ooo 


France, . 




. 


, . 




. , 125,000,000 


Italy, 








. . 


, . 




85,000,000 


Austria, . 














65,000,000 


Russia, . 














55,000,000 


Turkey, . . , 














. . 17,000,000 


Spain, 














20,000,000 


Prussia, . 














. ■ 10,000,000 


Holland, . 














. , 12,500,000 


Brazil, . 














10,000,000 


Peru, 














10,000,000 


Canada, . 












, . 


, . • 3,750,000 


Portugal, 














7,000,000 


Switzerland, . 












. 


. . 15,000 



To form an idea of the relative cost of some of the leading gov- 
ernments of the world, we cite from the statistics of 18G7, the ex- 
penditure per head of population : — 



New Zealand, 

Great Britain, 

United States, 

Canada, 

Prance, 

Russia, 

Italy, 

Brazil, 

Victoria (Australia), 

New South Wales (Australia) 

Prussia, . 

Sweden, . 

Austria, . 

Peru, 

Switzerland, 



(per head, annually,) 



$62.00 

16.12 

15.00 

4.72 

10.08 

4.06 

6.18 

2.90 

24.00 

26.60 

6.68 

2.76 

5.26 

8.51 

1.66 



A good idea of the business prosperity of a country may be ob- 
tained from statements of the value of its exports. A country which 
imports more than it sends Siway is, for the time being, certainly get- 
ting out of pocket. Appended are the values of the total exports 
and imports of some of the great countries as they were in 1867 : — 



United States, 

Great Britain and Ireland, 



Total Imports. 
$400,000,000 
1,475,000,000 



Total Exports. 
$275,000,000 
1,195,000,000 



600 



THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 











Total Imports. 


Total Exports. 


France, . 685,000,000 


790,000,000 


Germany, 








750,000,000 


700,000,000 


Austria, . 








120,000,000 


155,000,000 


Belgium, 








. 250,000,000 


235,000,000 


Italy, . 








195,000,000 


140,000,000 


Russia, . 








125,000,000 


125,000,000 


Holland, . 








180,000,000 


150,000,000 


Canada, . 








80,000,000 


65,000,000 


Chili, 
Brazil, . 








25,000,000 
.60,00.0,000. 


30,000,000 
75,000,000 


Spain, 








.85,000,000 


60,000,000 


India, . • , 








250,000,000 


350,000,000 


China, 








225,000,000 


170,000,000 


Australia, 








145,000,000 


140,000,000 



Here is what soldiering alone has cost France under Napoleon III. : — 

Crimean war, $269,000,000 

Italian " 69,000,000 

Chinese " . . . ... . 33,200,000 

Occupation of Rome, . . •...'• . 10,000,000 

• " Syria, . . ....... 5,600,000 

Mexican war in aid of Maximilian, t . . . 120,000,000 

Extra refreshments, . . ».•...•« 18,000,000 

. The total fiddling, . . . . . . $524,800,000 

Not one of these wars was of any material advantage to France, 
nor to anybody befriended, the Italian war included, which had to be 
fought over again in 1866. As to the Mexican war, modern times 
have seen no such melancholy failure. 

In 1851, when the Emperor had just taken his 

throne, France owed $1,069,127,472 

In 1861, when our civil war began, Erance owed . 1,943,835,383 
In 1867. France owed 2,700,000,000 



Or the annual interest upon this debt is $125,000,000, or about 
$3.28 for every man, woman, and child in France. 

The revenue of France, in the year 1867, was about three hundred 
and seventy-five millions of dollars ; seven and one-half millions of 
dollars in excess ; or it cost every human being in France ten dollars 
to be protected by the central government. 



CONTINENTAL FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT. 601 

The greatest banking-house in Europe, and one which is intimately 
identified with the politics of all the leading nations, is that of Roths- 
childs. 

The family of Rothschild was founded by Meyer Anselm, of Frank- 
fort, who died in 1812. He was born in the Jews' alley, was brought 
up to be a priest of the Hebrew faith, but becoming a money-broker, 
he was employed to raise a loan to relieve Frankfort from an invasion 
of French Republicans ; here Rothschild became associated with 
American history, for the money he obtained from the Elector of 
Hesse-Cassel, to aid Frankfort, was doubtless the inclentical gold 
paid by Great Britain to hire Hessian troops to subdue her American 
colonies. The Elector had in his possession about five millions of 
dollars, and when at a later date Napoleon marched upon him, Roths- 
child became the repositor of this immense sum, for which he paid no 
interest. It is therefore remarkable that the greatest banking-house in 
Europe owes its beginning to the hire of British mercenaries against 
the United States, and the sums thus infamously paid by England 
were efficacious, fifty years afterward, to give the first Jew admission 
to the English Parliament, in the person of a grandson of Meyer 
Rothschild. 

The five sons of the first Rothschild scattered over Europe : Nathan 
going to London, Solomon to Vienna, James to Paris, and Charles to 
Naples, while the ,fifth son, Anselm, remained with the old man at 
Frankfort. All these united in the wealthiest copartnership of the 
present, or probably of any other age ; in 1848 the} r lost forty mil- 
lion dollars by the revolution against Louis Philippe and his allies ; 
but their solvency after this disaster was their greatest advertisement. 
Anselm died childless, leaving a fortune of fifteen million dollars. 
Nathan, the eighth Rothschild, distributed the enormous subsidies 
which the British gave the Germans to war against France, and one 
of these payments, after the treaty of Toeplitz, amounted to sixty 
million dollars in gold. This same Nathan made one million of dol- 
lars by obtaining the result of the battle of Waterloo several hours 
before the English government. 

The Emperor of Austria made Nathan a Baron of the Empire, and 
this title descended to his eldest son, Lionel, who was the first Jew, 
as we have said, to enter the British Parliament, and he represented 
London city for several years. The Rothschild cousins all inter- 
marry, and as they obtain all the good loans of Europe, and refuse 
all the bad ones, their house seems destined to last as long as that of 
76 



602 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

Hapsburg, or Savoy, unless, like all royal lines, they suffer prema- 
ture mental degeneracy. 

When Foulcl, French minister, brought on the tapis the conver- 
sion of the rentes, he only employed Pereire, French banker, in the 
operation, which terribly offended Rothschild. Fould, who heard of 
this, and was afraid of Rothschild's influence, hastened to pay him 
a visit, but was very coldly received. In alarm he drove to the Em- 
peror, and said to him : — 

"Sire, I have made a mistake in passing over Rothschild in the 
conversion of the rentes. I am afraid he will pay us for it, for though 
he cannot upset the operation, he can injure it." 

" Leave me to act," Napoleon replied, u I take the affair on myself." 

The Emperor sent for Rothschild, and said to him : — 

"How is it with your chateau of La Ferriere? I hear that it is 
finished, and splendid beyond all description." 

" It is worth looking at, sire, although it is an exaggeration when 
people say that it cost five-and-twenty millions." 

" Twenty-five millions ! it must really be something wonderful ! 
Within a week I will come with the Empress to La Ferriere, and 
breakfast there. After breakfast we will go out shooting." 

Rothschild offered no obstacle to the conversion of the rentes. 

Two money-dealers — Rapallo and Solari — advanced Louis Na- 
poleon the funds for his Strasburg filibustering attempt. They 
went into speculations, which the confusion in the money-market 
produced by the expedition would render profitable. The money 
they advanced to the Prince is said to have amounted to a million of 
francs (two hundred thousand dollars). 

Louis Napoleon wanted three hundred thousand dollars, in order 
to become President. Thiers procured him the sum, and merely took 
a simple acknowledgment from the Prince. Not a word was said 
about interest. The President could not sufficiently express his 
gratitude, and pressed Thiers' hand, with a tear of emotion in his 
eye What a different man was this from the old bearded Jews, 
to whom Louis Napoleon had often applied in vain ! 

Eugenie has insured her life in the Paris Company, the Nationale, 
for two million francs. The original proposal was for five millions, or 
one million dollars ; but the company only accepted two, of which 
it reinsured one with other offices. The Germania, at Stettin, 
accepted one hundred thousand francs. The Empress's proposal was 



CONTINENTAL FINANCE AND GOVERNMENT. 603 

signed by Napoleon as her guardian. The insurance is in favor of 
her natural heirs, or of her son in the first instance. 

The richest state at present on the Continent is Prussia, having 
more surplus money in its treasury, than any other, and every day 
increases its importance. The " Zollverein " is a mutual Customs 
League, dating in its incipiency from 1828, and owing its origin to 
Prussia, the most advanced state in Germany ; it was reformed and re- 
arranged in 1867, and now comprises most of the German States, 
Austria excepted. It is composed of delegates with a central gov- 
ernment at Berlin, and has a common exchequer, into which all cus- 
toms are paid, and thendistributed pro rata amongst the different 
states according to population. The chief sources of German rev- 
enue are import and export duties, and taxes upon spirits, wine, 
beet-root sugar, and tobacco. There are two hundred and fifty -two 
beet-root sugar factories in Prussia alone. The object of the" Zoll- 
verein " is to dispense with custom-houses between the petty states 
of Germany. A note in the next chapter will further speak of Ger- 
many and Eastern Europe, 



CHAPTER XXIII. 

THE NEW WEST AND THE NEW EAST. 

Some notes upon the Western territories and coasts of the United States, and the problems 
of civilization in Eastern Europe. — Advances of America and Europe toward the Pacific. 
— The contest for preponderance in Asia. — Inquiry into the permanence of Russia's 
friendship for America, and into the stability of the British Empire in Polynesia amd 
North America. — America's diplomatic relations with the world. 

Russia and the United States have been occupying the attention of 
the world for a century, and within the past twenty years have been 
curiously studying each other. Apparently antipodes in origin, 
religion, mission, and position, they have the sympathy of magnetic 
poles with each other, — farthest apart, yet closest in communica- 
tion, — and each is assured that the axis of empire passes through 
itself. They have never been rivals ; if they have not always pur- 
sued the same principles, their separate material ambitions have 
commanded mutual respect. We shall all be glad in America when 
Russia absorbs the Turk, and Christianity resumes the capitalship 
of the Greek empire on the Bosphorus, and Russia has voluntarily sub- 
scribed to the " Monroe doctrine" by parting with her only posses- 
sion on the American continent. It seems to be without the range 
of probabilities that our two empires can collide ; the superstition in 
the American mind that we are the gigantic twins of Christendom, 
starting from Europe in opposite directions to mould the destinies, 
the one of the West the other of the East, has well-nigh reached the 
American heart, and when we read of our mutual fleets in the Dar- 
danelles manning the yards and mingling hurrahs and u hourras," 
we feel a thrill akin to that of a lover discovering reciprocal passion 
in his sweetheart. 

The differences between the American and the Russian States are 
not so profitable subjects for investigation as their resemblances. 
Each has a work to do, and its temperament and system are adapted 
to its separate mission. The tribes which accept civilization at the 
point of the Russian's sword would be irreverent scholars of the 

601 




4 5 

HARBORS AND FORTRESSES. 

1— Ehrenbreitstein. 2— Gibraltar. 3— The Narrows. 4— Fortress Monroe 

5— Citadel , Quebec. 



THE NEW WEST AND THE NEW EAST. 605 

American ballot. Russia must civilize the nations in bulk ; we 
initiate them into Republicanism, man by man. And who can say 
that the condition of the Asiatic is not improved by the prowess of 
Russia as much as the European by the institutions of America? 
These are some of the resemblances between the United States and 
Europe in which Russia takes a prominent place : — 

The same geographical and ethnological circumstances mark both. 
The Atlantic coasts are jagged and broken, and they were first 
civilized by various races, so that there had nearly been as 
many distinct nations in Florida, Louisiana, Canada, Virginia, 
and New York, as in Spain, France, England, and Holland. The 
interiors of the two continents are broad, compact, of vast agricul- 
tural resources, similarly marked by plains, prairies, steppes, and 
irrigated by an immense river system, and the aborigines of both 
continents, entering from the frontier, had to be pushed back, 
absorbed, or civilized from the Atlantic. The Gulf of Mexico and 
the Mediterranean, on the south, were first discovered, developed, 
and became the seat of the mythology of their respective continents ; 
Mexico and Italy, Cuba and Sicily, recall each other as do the cities 
of Rome and Mexico, the careers of Romulus and Cortes, Columbus 
and JEneas, the Buccaneers and the Saracens ; the northern races 
triumphed over the Latins, the Saxon over the Spaniard and Gaul 
in both cases. The Gulf and River of St. Lawrence and their lakes 
suggest the English Channel, the North and the Baltic Seas ; St. 
Petersburg, in its rapid rise, growth, and influence, may be likened 
only to Chicago, at the heads of these frozen courses, respectively. 
The dense population, the more perfect cities, the historic landmarks 
and memorials are by the slopes of the Atlantic ; Russia, like the 
American Western States and Territories, busied with its immense 
material projects, has also a like imperfect social organization ; the 
principle of civilization, and the germ of art and literature are in 
both cases at war with the rapacity of the savage, the violence of 
the pioneer and outlaw, the heathen tradition of the Mormon or the 
Turk, the anarchy of the Mexican or the Tartar ; the knout and 
" Judge Lynch " suggest each other ; and as America is retarded, in 
its march to the South and the Isthmus, by European influences in 
the West Indies and the indolent patriotism of Mexico and Spanish 
America, so Russia is pushed out of the short course to the Indies by 
Turkey and " balance of power/' and compelled, like the United 
States, to go overland to the Pacific. The lines of Ural and Rocky 



606 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

Mountains stand between America and Russia, and their broad fron- 
tier empires ; out of these two ranges come their precious minerals ; 
beyond them lie their grandest problems and resources ; by the 
Caspian Sea, the largest inland salt lake in the world, Russia has a 
natural highway toward the Pacific, as have we by the Missouri, the 
longest of all rivers, and the Caspian is connected by canal directly 
with the Baltic, as is the Missouri with the St. Lawrence ; and by the 
Amoor River, which they have navigated at low water for two thou- 
sand miles, the Russians have hopes of a better route than the 
Pacific Railroad's to reach the Pacific Ocean by steam. The Isthmus 
of Suez, purchased by an enterprising Frenchman, to the surprise and 
jealousy of Russia and England, and successfully pierced by a canal, 
reminds and warns us of the impending fate of the Central American 
Isthmus, which offers Europe the sole remaining and shortest route to 
the Pacific, and of the late design of France to seize Mexico and 
Central America also. The latest aspect of European emigration to 
America, the Scandinavian, and the settlement of large numbers of 
Swedes and Norwegians about the peninsulas of Michigan, Wiscon- 
sin, and Minnesota, show us how remarkably America has become a 
reproduction of Europe. Not more truly does the blowing seed seek 
like soil to that of its birthplace, than does every European race find 
a land like its native land in America. 

A paragraph upon the races of Europe and America will indicate 
another analogy in our Continents : North America has (1860) nearly 
fifty millions of people, more than three-fifths of whom are in the 
United States ; and Europe has two hundred and eighty millions, 
nearly one fourth of whom (sixty-seven millions) are in Russia. Of 
the five great types of man, two are practically absent from our Con- 
tinent, the Mongol and the Malay, and three are absent from Europe, 
the American, the African, and the Malay. The great problems of 
the United States have been the American Indians and the African, 
— to subdue the one and to fix the status of the other ; the great 
problem of Europe has been to resist and expel the Mongol and his 
Caucasian kin. For a thousand years the Moor and the Turk have 
been the insoluble element of Europe, irreconcilable, intractable, in- 
capable of conversion. At times Christendom has united against 
them ; oftener divided its energies against itself. In America we 
have never had a distinctive war of races or of religions. Until these 
years in which we write, we have never had upon this Continent a 
decided and organized heathen element, and we fondly hope that even 



THE NEW WEST AND THE NEW EAST. 607 

the Chinese will be made useful and peaceable in the crucible of our 
tolerant institutions. 

There are three great subdivisions of Christian Europeans generally 
received, whom we shall call, for crispness, Germanes, Sclaves, and 
Latins. The Germanes make the great bulk of our American popula- 
tion, and they comprehend the offspring of Germans, English, Scan- 
dinavians, and Dutch. The Latins are those nations which are derived 
from the mixture of the ancient Romans with peoples who make the 
modern nations of Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal ; of these we 
have a small percentage in America blended with us. The last great 
division of Sclaves is almost entirely absent from America : namely, 
the Russians, Poles, Moravians, Bohemians, Croats, etc. These lat- 
ter, situated in the east of Europe, have never felt the great impulse 
of Western emigration, and Russia is the New World to them, being 
comparatively sparsely peopled, having vast reserves of land in Asia, 
and ambitious prospects in Turkey and the Orient. From the Latins, 
South and Central America have been peopled, by amalgamation with 
Indians and negroes. It may be broadly said, therefore, that the 
three great groups of civilization are, 1. The United States, Great 
Britain, Germany, Scandinavia, and Australia. 2. South and Central 
America, France, Italy, and Spain. 3. Russia and her dependencies. 
It is- these immense human families, artificially or geographically sep- 
arated and intermixed, w T hich are contending for dominion. The 
Latins are practically out of the contest ; in South America they are 
fixed, and busied with their own concerns ; in Europe they are poor 
colonizers, but enterprising adventurers. The Germanes are divided 
into three vigorous commercial families : 1. The (North) Americans ; 
2. The English ; 3. The true Germans, including the Dutch prospec- 
tively. The Russians (4.) are a mighty unit, bearing southward 
and eastward at once. And the prize of all these four colonizing 
and commercial powers is the trade of America, Asia, and Polynesia. 

In America there are but two promising contestants for trade and 
influence, the United States and England, Russia having withdrawn 
from the contest, and France having been beaten off the Continent by 
American diplomacy and Mexican perseverance. In Southern Asia 
there are four contestants : England, which possesses the Indian Em- 
pire ; France, which has seized the most available route overland 
through the isthmus of Egypt ; Holland (or the Netherlands) , which pos- 
sesses Java, Sumatra, Borneo, and other colonies in the Indian Ocean, 
containing a population of eighteen millions ; and Russia, whose em- 



608 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

pire extends in fact to the Pacific Ocean and in the near future to the 
-Indian Ocean. In the Pacific Ocean these four powers are squarely 
met by the United States, which, without possessions or the wish for 
them, has paramount influence in Japan, the favor of China, the 
friendly countenance of Russia, and good feeling with 'all the great 
English colonies planted there. The United States is the only power 
on the Pacific which has not been guilty of intrigue, of double-deal- 
ing, of envy and of bitterness, and it has taken the front rank in 
influence without awakening the dislike of any of its competitors, 
possibly excepting those English who are never magnanimous. After 
years of Portuguese wheedling and Dutch cringing, the Americans 
stepped in with the cordial manliness of their character, and carried 
home as guests many Princes and scholars of the Japanese Empire, 
since which time we have been on frank terms with Japan, and the 
Japanese are becoming our fellow-citizens in California. After years 
of English and French cannonading and blustering, marked by the 
disgraceful imposition of opium upon China, and the occupation of her 
ports, an American Minister has quietly gained the confidence of the 
Chinese, and he is teaching the nations how universally captivating 
are the principles of a republic, and how much better is citizenship 
than diplomacy to understand and reach the affections of jealously 
civilized people. 

Since the consolidation of the greater part of Germany under the 
mailed hand of Count Bismarck,* it is not improbable that Holland 

* I have perhaps passed over German politics too hastily, and therefore summarize it in a 
note : — • 

The reigning houses of Austria and Prussia had honorable origins. Rudolph, of Haps- 
burg, called to the Kaisership of Germany in the year 1273, for his valor and virtues, 
founded a line which united with the House of Lorraine, in 1740; the twenty-six sover- 
eigns of these lines have ruled for average terms of twenty-two years. The House of 
Hohenzollern began with one of Charlemagne's Generals, and was afterward given control 
of certain Baltic provinces by the Hapsburg Emperors. The three predecessors of Fred- 
erick (II.) " the Great " established a standing army and a handsome treasury, with which 
Frederick, the cotemporary of Washington, increased his kingdom from two and a half 
millions of people to five and a half millions. By other additions, and by the war of 
18C6, Prussia became a stronger power than Austria, with nearly twenty-three millions of 
people. 

The rivalry between Austria and Prussia began in Frederick's time. Prussia had 
Protestant and liberal institutions, and aspired to become the leading state in Germany. 
Her people were mainly of the German race, while Austria, governing a variety of dis- 
similar people, and inheriting absolute ideas upon monarchy and religion, grew away from 
the age and its sympathies. The German republicans, in 1848, mastered both dominions, 
and offered the crown of consolidated Germany to the King of Prussia, who, had he 
accepted it, might have anticipated the results of Sadowa by eighteen years, and dispensed 



THE NEW WEST AND THE NEW EAST. G09 

and her colonies in the East will become subordinate to the polity of 
Prussia, and Amsterdam and Rotterdam either yield to Bremen and 
Hamburg, or become partners with them in the same clear-headed 
Saxon nationality. Bremen is coming up at present as the German 
Liverpool, and her great maritime company of the North German 
Llo}*d maintain about a dozen fine steamships in the American trade. 
The Netherlands Trading Company, with head-quarters at Amsterdam, 

with Bismarck. When Austria and Prussia, acting in concert, forced Schleswig and Holstein 
from Denmark, in 1864-5, their rivalry could no longer smoulder, and they prepared for 
war. The speedy result was the complete humiliation of Austria, and the advancement of 
Prussia to the head of all the German peoples. The French people, jealous of Prussia's 
promotion, were clamorous for war, and a dispute over the little state of Luxembourg seemed 
likely to produce a rupture, but Napoleon held back, and subsequently Austria conceded 
liberal institutions to her subjects, rebuffed her reactionary clergy, and granted the Hun- 
garians their ancient privileges, while Prussia greatly improved the material affairs of 
North Germany; and, by the peace, France also seems about to realize under Napoleon a 
more liberal charter than she has enjoyed for thirty years. Since Sadowa, and, by reason 
of the peace which has prevailed on the continent, Spain also has accomplished a tranquil 
revolution, and expelled the disgraceful woman whose career at her court resembled that of 
Messalina. Even Denmark, humiliated and reduced, seems happier than before her parti- 
tion, and in the autumn of 1869 the only agitations in Western Europe seemed to be 
among the Sclavonic races of Austria, several millions in number, which dislike the German 
language, laws, and character, and in Italy, which is dissatisfied with the foreign and 
priestly occupation of Rome. It is remarkable that this liberalization of Europe has not 
rewarded, but obscured, the careers of those three great pioneers of liberty and nationality, 
Kossuth, Mazzini, and Garibaldi. Kossuth i3 still in exile, although Hungary is as far 
redeemed as the majority of her people seem to wish, and the favorite of the hour is Deak, 
the moderate leader. A paragraph upon Magyar and Sclave politics may not be out of 
place. The leading names in Hungary, after Kossuth, are Batthyanyi, Teleki, and Deak. 
Casimir Batthyanyi belonged to an ancient family, and was made Minister of Foreign 
Affairs during Kossuth's insurrection; he died in exile; his kinsman, Louis, became the head 
of the revolutionary government, proved incompetent, and notwithstanding his moderation, 
the Austrians executed him. After the " pacificacion " of Hungary, the moderate party of 
that kingdom was led by Franz Deak, an eloquent lawyer, and the extreme party by 
Ladislas Teleki. The latter died in 1861, and Deak lived to see the complete triumph of hi3 
policy in 1867. The object of Deak was to preserve Hungary as a component of the Aus- 
trian Empire, but to retain all its ancient privileges of a separate ministry, all in short that 
Hungary rebelled to recover in 1848; this would never have been granted but for the 
reverses of Austria in 1866, when Von Beust, the new Austrian Prime Minister, advised it. 
At present Transylvania, Crotia, and Sclavonia, non-Hungarian provinces, are united with 
Hungary against their will, and sit in the Hungarian diet at Pesth. The Sclave population 
of Austria outnumbers both the German and the Magyar elements, separately; the Sclaves 
hate the Germans, and they made the Hussite celebration at Prague, in 1869, an occasion of 
political manifestation. While progress continues to be the rule for the present, it must not 
still be inferred that Europe is at peace. A hundred little questions perpetually in ebulli- 
tion, may coalesce and make a maelstrom at any instant. In general terms, it may be said 
that Norway has now the freest government in Europe, and the Papal States the most 

illiberal. 

77 



610 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

has a capital of sixteen millions of dollars, and its shares sell at 149, 
with annual dividends often per cent. Its capital is Batavia, with a 
population of one hundred and twenty thousand, the emporium of 
island India, as Hindostan is of mainland India. Singapore is the 
British rival of Batavia on the Indian islands. Prussia, Holland, 
Hanover, Bremen, Hamburg, Oldenburg, and North Germany, unit- 
edly possess about six thousand four hundred and sixteen ves- 
sels of all sorts, of one million one hundred and seventeen thou- 
sand tons altogether. Prussia has never had colonies, but the Dutch 
are old hands at establishing distant empires, and they are noted as 
amongst the most unfeeling, tyrannical, and phlegmatic taskmasters 
in the world. Holland is probably losing rank amongst commercial 
nations, and can only be electrified by the energy, statesmanship, and 
resources of Germany. But even thus absorbed she can be no match 
for the United States, England, and Russia, in controlling the Pacific 
and Indian seas. 

At the southern part of Germany, with her outlet upon the Adri- 
atic, Austria, like Prussia, stands without a colony, yet with no 
insignificant commerce, and with a naval spirit which availed in 
1866 to redeem the disaster of Sadowa, by the victory of Lissa. 
Austria possessed, in 1864, nine thousand six hundred and forty- 
three vessels in her commercial marine, of three hundred and thirty- 
one thousand two hundred and eighty-seven tons, and manned by 
thirty-seven thousand men. Her Bremen is the city of Trieste, 
which stands nearly opposite Venice, at the head of the Adriatic, and 
her naval station is Pola, seventy-five miles further south. Trieste 
is the head- quarters of a celebrated maritime company, called the 
Austrian Lloyd, which has a fleet of seventy-four steamers, plying to 
all parts of the Mediterranean, and competing with the maritime 
companies of Genoa and Marseilles. The onl} r outlet besides the 
Adriatic, for Austria, is the Danube River, which gives unreliable and 
roundabout access to the Black Sea and Western Asia. Two thou- 
sand vessels, of eight hundred thousand tons, of all nations, navi- 
gated the Danube, in 1860. The Turks had undisputed possession of 
the Black Sea (which is about twice the size of Lake Superior) until 
the beginning of the American Revolution, when Russia obtained the 
privilege of trading in it. Since that da}-, the Russian, like the 
American eagle, has crossed the continent, and drawn near the trop- 
ics. The Danube Steam Navigation Company, of Vienna, advertised, 



THE NEW WEST AND THE XEW EA 611 

in 1869. that it possessed one hundred and forty light draught steam- 
ships. 

Austria can probably never become a great naval power, unless by 
some good fortune she could reanimate and conciliate the Ital- 
who owe her so long and so remorseless misery. I 
hundred and sixty thousand superior sailors, and Greece has twenty- 
five thousand admirable watermen. The prostrate condition of Italy, 
and the cramped and unprofitable state of Greece, are the results 
of the short-sighted and greedful policy of what has been called, for 
a century, the ; - statesmanship " of the Great Powers. Afraid to give 
Greece a republic, and to accord her space commensurate with her 
spirit, they have fastened to her destinies, now a crowned beer- 
drinker, and now a mere lad of a decayed house, subjected Christian 
be to massacre, and kept in pinafores the countrymen of Ypsilanti 
and Bozzaris. Their alliances have been with Haynau and Haps- 
burg, instead of Garibaldi and Cavour, and at the end, behold ! Italy 
regenerated, but in rags : the Russia they were at such pains to sum- 
mon against the march of republican France, grown aware of its 
power, and threatening to devour them ; and the Austria, with which 
their holy alliances were made, which had a monarch ready for every 
dilemma, and a groom for every princess, smitten one blow by the 

ling Prussia of yesterday, has tumbled into a heap of old purple 
clothes, and pawnbrokers' tickets. The sympathies of the American 
people are with Greece and Italy, but with the fate of the provinces 
of Austria the same statesmanship must deal which first violently 
flung them together. Common sense would seem to indicate that the 
first step would be for the German part of Austria to join the North 

^an confederation ; the second, for the Hapsburgs to retire upon 

. laurels, — Mexico, Sado h, — and lastly to make Hungary 

a new state, with such neighbors as will share her fortunes, and qui- 

pennit her and Greece to consume as much of Turkey as will 
agree with them : the residue, being Italian, will fall by gravity to 
the Kingdom of Italy. 

As we approach R _ :ng eastward, we feel a similar sensation 

to that with which we pass the River Mississippi, and enter upon the 
ad plains of the United Behind us, on either hand, are 

Berlin and Vienna, the last great cities of elderly Europe, E 
cago an J St Louis. Before us. wider apart, on the verge of 
mighty empire, are Warsaw and Pesth, which, like our battle-fields 
where perished two rude but gallant Indian tribes recall their names 



612 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

as we pass through, — Poland, the land of Kosciusko ; Hungary, the 
land of Kossuth. Pesth is one hundred and seventy-one miles east 
«rf Vienna, and possesses one hundred and thirty thousand people. 
Warsaw is three hundred miles east of Berlin, and contains two hun- 
dred and forty thousand people. 

We have crossed the frontier of Russia, and spread before us to the 
Pacific Ocean, to the Arctic Sea, to the streams which flow into the 
Indian Ocean, the domain of Russia lies, — in round numbers, eight 
millions of square miles. Before us is Kiev, perhaps the future cap- 
ital of Russia, on the latitude of Brussels, Newfoundland, and Van- 
couver. Due north of Kiev, six hundred and fifty miles, is St. 
Petersburg, the present capital, on the latitude of Greenland, and 
Mt. St. Elias, Russian America. Due south of Kiev, two hundred 
and fifty miles, is Odessa, the great grain port of Russia, on the lat- 
itude of Switzerland, Quebec, and Portland, Oregon. Due east of 
Odessa, eight hundred miles, is Astrachan, on the Caspian Sea, 
twelve hundred miles south-east of St. Petersburg, and on the air 
line between these two latter cities stands Moscow, four hundred 
miles from the capital. East of Moscow, two hundred and fifty miles, 
is Niznii Novgorod ; west of Moscow, five hundred miles, is Riga. 
These seven cities are, in present or future importance, the most con- 
siderable of Russia. Moscow was the old capital, and is at present 
the main manufacturing city of Russia, — its Philadelphia, with four 
hundred thousand people. It is very nearly at the centre of Russia, 
near the sources of its river systems, and at the junction of its rail- 
way system, and besides its industrial and historical attractions it is 
the seat of Russia's greatest university. Niznii or Nijnii (lower) 
Novgorod is the seat of an immense intercontinental fair, held for a 
month every summer, during which the population of forty thousand 
rises to two hundred thousand ; every great nation being represented 
in it, from America to China. The mighty River Volga, the largest in 
Europe, flowing past Novgorod, and close by Moscow, reaches from 
near St. Petersburg to Astrachan, twenty-three hundred miles. 
Astrachan is the Omaha of Russia, with forty thousand people ; it 
stands on the delta of the Volga, and receives from Persia, on the 
opposite shore of the Caspian Sea, silks, precious drugs, and the 
manifold products of the East. Kiev, on the Dnieper River, is admi- 
rably situated for a political capital to control the politics of Turkey, 
Poland, and Hungary together, and it contains about one hundred 
thousand people. It is the city where Christianity was first pro- 



THE NEW WEST AND THE NEW EAST. 613 

claimed in Russia ; has a university and a sanctuary, and is alto- 
gether better adapted for an influential capital city than St. Peters- 
burg. Riga is on the River Dwina, five miles from the Gulf of Riga, 
and three hundred and seventy-six miles on the way to middle Eu- 
rope, from St. Petersburg ; it is a sort of Baltic Quebec, with one 
railroad, like the Grand Trunk, and its exports, amounting to twenty 
million dollars, go chiefity to England ; they consist of flax, hemp, 
linseed, corn, timber, tallow, and tobacco. It is a dingy, gloomy 
town, cold andunbeloved. Odessa has one hundred and twenty thou- 
sand people, mainty Jews, Greeks, and Italians. It is a free port, 
and owes its prosperity largely to a French nobleman, the Due de 
Richelieu, who was expelled from France in the Revolution, and made 
Governor here by the Czar Alexander ; but the town is older than the 
Christian era, and it is now the third commercial city of Russia, 
outranked only by St. Petersburg and Riga. The English nearly 
destroyed its fleet in 1854, and shot Richelieu. The city, itself, like 
Chicago, has poor river communication with the interior, and but two 
railways, one still incomplete. The surrounding soil is arid and 
poor ; building stone lies close by, out of which many handsome edi- 
fices have been constructed, and, like Chicago in former days, Odessa 
has exceedingly poor water ; the former city stands on a prairie, while 
Odessa is upon a cliff, and its harbor is better than that of Chicago, 
being very deep, seldom frozen, and capable of holding two hundred 
vessels. The roads around and in Odessa are almost impassable in 
muddy weather, and the thermometer frequently rises there in sum- 
mer to 120°. The city exports about twenty million bushels of wheat 
a year, and this comprises half its entire exports, which are valued 
at thirty million dollars annually, or two-thirds more than its imports. 
America sends thirty-one per cent, of all the wheat imported into the 
English United Kingdom, and Canada seven per cent. ; Germany and 
Russia together send about as much as all America combined. The 
growth of Odessa bears no proportion to that of our great Western 
cities, and as an example of the latter we may cite Chicago, the 
Odessa of the North-west. 

Chicago is now the most extensive grain and lumber market in the 
world. In 1838 the first shipment of wheat consisted of seventy- 
eight bushels ; in 1862 there were exported in flour and grain of all 
kinds from the port fifty-six million four hundred and eighty-four 
thousand one hundred and ten bushels. During the year there were 
shipped one million eight hundred and twenty-eight thousand one 



614 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

hundred and sixty-four barrels of flour. In 1863, one million five 
hundred and thirty-seven thousand eight hundred and sixteen barrels 
of flour, or flour and grain of all kinds equal to about fifty-five 
million bushels. 

The receipts of lumber in Chicago in 1865 were six hundred and six 
million six hundred and forty-two thousand three hundred feet ; 
shingles, three hundred and four million two hundred and sixteen thou- 
sand ; lath, sixty million three hundred and forty thousand ; sent by lake 
and railroad transportation to all points in Illinois, to Indiana, Ohio, 
New York, and westward to Iowa, Missouri, Dakota, Nebraska, 
Kansas, and the lower Mississippi. The trade in staves, railroad 
ties, telegraph posts, fence posts, and other similar materials, is very 
extensive, and the amount of capital invested in the lumber traffic 
immense. 

Chicago city holds an equally leading position in the pork and beef 
trade of the West, and next to New York is the greatest cattle market 
in the United States. The trade is also very extensive in salt, lead, 
hides, tallow, the products of the dairy, orchards, in distilled spirits, 
and other articles. The lake tonnage of the port, in 1864, was two 
million one hundred and seventy-two thousand eight hundred and 
sixty-six tons in arrivals, and two million one hundred and sixty-six 
thousand nine hundred and four in clearances, and during the season 
eight thousand nine hundred and thirt}'-nine vessels and propellers 
arrived, and eight thousand eight hundred and twenty-four cleared, — 
the tonnage engaged wholly in the Chicago trade amounting to one 
hundred and ninety-eight thousand and five. 

The cost of buildings erected in the city, in 1865, was seven million 
five hundred and ten thousand dollars, and the number in 1866 was 
nine thousand. 

The wholesale dry goods business forms a large interest, the sales 
having reached thirty-five million dollars a year, and the trade in 
boots, shoes, and clothing, twenty-five million dollars. The neigh- 
borhood of Chicago is fruitful of large and vigorous municipalities. 
Springfield, the capital, near the geographical centre, in the rich and 
beautiful valley of the Sangamon, is one of the handsomest cities in 
the West, and rapidly increasing in population, wealth, and refine- 
ment. Galena, Aurora, Quincy, and Alton on the Mississippi ; Cairo 
at the mouth of the Ohio, and Peoria on the Illinois, are enterprising 
and growing cities. 

The educational interests of the State are in a most flourishing 



THE NEW WEST AND THE NEW EAST. 615 

condition, nine thousand seven hundred and fifty-three school-houses 
having been reported on 30th September, 1866, with six hundred and 
fourteen thousand six hundred and fifty-nine pupils, and over seven- 
teen thousand two hundred teachers ; the revenue for the year ending 
30th September, 1866, in support of the school interest, amount- 
ing to four million four hundred and forty-five thousand one hundred 
and thirty dollars/ 

In 1860, there were in the State eighteen colleges, two thousand 
nine hundred students, and an income of ninety-seven thousand four 
hundred and twelve dollars ; two hundred and eleven academies with 
thirteen thousand two hundred and five pupils, and an income of two 
hundred and thirty-three thousand two hundred and sixty-two dollars. 

There were at the same time eight hundred and fifty -four libraries, 
two hundred and forty-six of which were public ; two hundred and 
forty-three for schools ; three hundred and thirty-nine for Sunday- 
schools ; seven college and nineteen church libraries ; with a total of 
two hundred and forty-four thousand three hundred and ninety-four 
volumes. 

The finances of the State of Illinois are in a very encouraging con- 
dition, and the debt contracted in the construction of its extensive 
railroad lines is being speedily reduced by annual payment of the 
interest and gradual liquidation of the principal. 

St. Petersburg, in its origin, reminds one of Washington City, and 
while it has grown to be one of the most magnificent cities in the 
world, it is bleak, expensive, unloved, and a perpetual sacrifice to 
the great interests of the empire. As Washington was selected for 
our capital in deference to General Washington, St. Petersburg was 
made the capital of Russia by the direct order of Peter the Great, the 
Russian Washington. Peter, who died seven years before the birth of 
Washington, inherited a cramped empire, at war with the Poles, the 
Tartars, the Turks, and the Swedes ; but he had the advantage of a 
homogeneous race for his subjects, and his state, like England, Sicily, 
and France, owed its original vigor to an infusion of Normans. He 
was an intellectual savage, of fierce appetites and boundless aspira- 
tions, and he modelled his empire upon the dictates of his personal 
will, without regarding the natural or national bent of his people. 
Engaged at that period in war with the disciplined Swedes, Peter 
founded his capital upon Swedish soil, and proceeded to conquer his 
way to the coasts of the Baltic, the Black, and the Caspian Seas. He 
visited civilized lands and imported their arts, their artists, and their 



616 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

disciplinarians, and he had himself been in part the creation of 
German, Genevese, and Scotch adventurers. He married his Swedish 
mistress, executed his own son, became a ship carpenter in Holland, 
was made a Doctor of Laws by Oxford University, and died drunk. 
The Russians are, like himself, a savage people, ardent for acquisi- 
tions, mental and material, and deriving them from the more polished 
world, but revealing the seams of these enforced additions, — a people 
whose destinies have grown too fast for their education, and who 
behold themselves masters of a seventh part of the globe, and yet 
have created nothing and discovered nothing ; but who borrow on the 
left hand the appliances of civilization to subjugate barbarism on the 
right hand. Their dynasty is German, and in crimes, in acquisitive- 
ness, in cold, calculating, unfeeling, mathematical ability, it may be 
considered the extreme development of Teutonic statesmanship ; 
the people are Sclaves, and their obedience bears out the derivation 
of their name ; their civilization, as far as it goes, is Latin, at court 
French, in trade Greek and Jewish, in commerce Italian. But all 
the elements of civilization are uneasily at work in Russia, — a litera- 
ture, a democracy, an opposition party on every question, — and it 
may prove that with so much cleared from her path by the foresight 
and ferocious energy of her Czars, Russia is to realize within her 
boundaries a lustrous civilization, when Western Europe has passed 
to languor and decay. 

The wife of Peter the Great died intoxicated, like himself, and the 
successor, Catharine II., who paved the way for Russia to oppose the 
French Revolution, was an infamous woman of ability, successful in 
her favorites. Paul, who followed her, hated England and its policy 
in Europe, and was strangled by his family ; and Alexander, the sub- 
jugator of Napoleon, became afterward a religious fanatic, and an 
enemy of popular progress everywhere. Nicholas was a surly tyrant, 
who discovered in his war with the Western powers, that Europe was 
not endowed with the weak heart of Asia, and when France, 
England, and Italy invaded Russia on the South, the mighty empire 
proved to be almost bankrupt in purse, and its seat of danger peril- 
ously remote from its seat of power. The present Emperor, of a 
more cheerful heart, has made his reign beneficent by abolishing serf- 
dom, and by happy coincidence, at nearly the same time that slavery 
ceased in America, twenty-two millions of bondmen recovered their 
freedom in Russia ; soon afterward, the Dutch emancipated throughout 
their dominions, and except in Spanish and Portuguese colonies, and 



THE NEW WEST AND THE NEW EAST. 617 

Brazil, slavery perished amongst the Christian nations of the earth. St, 
Petersburg is scarcely older than Pittsburg or Cincinnati, and occupies 
amongst cities of modern growth a place half-way between New York 
and Chicago. It has about the population of Philadelphia, is about the 
same distance from its seaport, Cronstadt, as New York from the 
ocean, covers forty-two square miles, is fifty-six feet aobve the sea, 
and contains sixty-four public squares, and five hundred streets. It 
is like Chicago in its temporary bridges of piles, is intersected with a 
river and water courses, built upon a marsh, and while the thermom- 
eter varies between 99° and — 51°, the ice in the river Neva is fre- 
quentty a yard and a half thick ! There are many enormous things 
in St. Petersburg, — a street of palaces one hundred and thirty feet 
wide and four miles long, a palace seven hundred feet square, which, 
when full, in the court season, contains six thousand inhabitants, a 
library of four hundred and fifty thousand volumes, immense govern- 
ment factories of bronzes, mirrors, tapestry, porcelain, playing cards, — 
for Russia is a high-tariff country, where every domestic industry is 
" protected," — and a freshet every year ; but the magnificent city is 
gray, sombre, cold, dreary, — a metropolitan Sitka, — and it is very 
far removed from the great destinies of Russia, so that not improba- 
bly, the capital of Peter the Great will one day be left to its own 
resources, and Kiev become the ruling place. 

Within the Russian Empire the disaffected party at present is the 
nobility, which seems to perceive that the present drift of polity 
there is to raise the common standard of citizenship by education and 
reward, and quietly soften all distinctions between the autocrat and 
the populace ; but so stupendous are the projects of Russia, and her 
energy in developing them, so uniform is her success, and so much 
wider than any internal dissensions are her exterior interests, that 
there can scarcely be said to be any disaffected organization in Rus- 
sia. The struggle of the empire is to get a solid footing on the sea. 
And at present Russia is using every power to conquer her way to 
the Indian Ocean, where Western Europe and particularly England, 
have everything to fear from her advent. To be a great empire she 
must abut upon the temperate seas ; for at present she is in the plight 
of Canada, frozen up on the east and the west all winter long, and 
the inland waters to the south of her are held by her rivals. In past 
times Russia was one of the great highways between India and Eu- 
rope ; the traffic which afterward took the routes of Venice, Constanti- 
nople, Egypt, or the Cape of Good Hope, once climbed the Volga and 
78 



618 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

sought the outlet of the Baltic. To recover the trade of the East, the 
precious commerce in gold, gems, spices, drugs, coffee, cotton, and 
fabrics of fine wool and silk, — Russia is resolved to become a com- 
mercial power on the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and here she becomes 
a party to the great " Eastern Question." 

The United States now possesses two lines of communication with 
the Pacific Ocean, the Panama Railroad and the Pacific Railroad, and 
these are the only avenues yet open on our continent ; the Panama 
Railroad was finished in 1855, and it is forty miles long.* The Isth- 
mus of Suez furnishes, at present, the only rival steam communication 
between Europe and the Pacific, and the Suez Railroad was opened 
in 1858. Two years previously, one M. de Lesseps, a Frenchman, 
planned and obtained a charter for a ship canal through the isthmus, 
and the same year which witnessed the opening of the Pacific Rail- 
road recited the triumph of this canal, which had been at the begin- 
ning pronounced impracticable by George Stephenson, the English 
engineer, and regarded to the last by English writers and politicians 
with jealousy and mortification. Its total cost was about eighty mil- 
lions of dollars. Its success seems to have been complete, and it will 
probably be considered the most extraordinary monument of the 
reign of Napoleon III., replacing as it does the canals of Pharaoh, 
Trajan, and Amrou. 

Having denounced the Suez Canal as visionary and unprofitable, 
no sooner is it done than the English are crying aloud for a highway 
of their own to India, and this they propose to secure by a railroad 
from Constantinople to the Euphrates River, thence connecting with 
steamers to Kurrachee or to Bombay ; they now remember bitterly how 
they called the Pacific Railroad in 1858 a " speculator's dream ; " yet 
the latter road, five hundred miles longer than their long contem- 
plated one, is as accomplished as the English character, while India 
and England are united only by telegraph poles, and by the permis- 
sion of the French canal-makers. The proposed Euphrates route 
would revive long-decayed cities of antiquity, and would drain the rich 
regions of Persia, Arabia, and Asia Minor ; it is to the interests of 
civilization to see it opened up, but France and Russia would make 

* In 1695 the Scotch organized a Darien Company to occupy and control the Isthmus of 
Panama. Four millions antl a half of dollars were subscribed, and twenty-five hundred 
men actually founded on the isthmus the " city" of New Edinburgh. They were opposed by 
a bigoted home government, deserted by the American colonies of England, and finally 
driven off by the Spanish. 



THE NEW WEST AND THE NEW EAST. 619 

of its concession by Turkey a political affront, and either threaten or 
bribe the Sultan to refuse it. Russia, meantime, has also projected 
a route to the Indian Ocean from the head of the Caspian Sea, to pass 
through Persia ; for Persia is as dependent upon Eussia for existence 
as is Turkey upon England, while Egypt is allied with France. And 
this is the great " Eastern Question/' of which we hear so much: 
Shall England, France, or Russia, or any two of them, become para- 
mount in the politics of Egypt, Persia and Turkey, so as to control 
the highwa}- s and trade of the East ? 

So far as Persia is concerned, the nearest great neighbor of British 
India, this precedence is already settled : Russia by a series of wars, 
lasting nearly forty years, and by subsequent intrigue at the Persian 
Court has completely succeeded in making Persia her creature. The 
Shah surrenders deserters from the Russian army, and permits the 
building of Russian ships-of-war in his ports of Resht and Astrabad. 
Persia is a despotism, corrupt like Egypt and Turkey, with a popula- 
tion of ten millions and an army of one hundred and twenty thousand 
men, thirty thousand of whom are cavalry equal to the Russian Cos- 
sacks. Between Persia and India stands only the dreary waste of 
Afghanistan to protect British India from the Russian, and the forti- 
fied town of Herat, near the Persian border, is the only considerable 
bulwark that the English have against Russia. The latter power is 
constantly inciting her vassal, Persia, to capture this place. The 
most amusing thing in Teheran, the capital of Persia, is to see amongst 
the mud residences of its one hundred thousand people the big adver- 
tising palaces of the Russian and the English ambassador, each striv- 
ing to outwit, or outbid, or outthreaten the other. At present, the 
British believe that by eight years of inglorious warfare they have 
impressed themselves upon the resolute Afghans ; but Mr. Dilke, an 
English traveller, showed the hollowness of this assurance in 1867; 
for the Afghans are mere dependents of Persia, and Persia is the vas- 
sal of Russia. In 1866 the Russians occupied much of Turkestan, 
the region north of Herat, and at the present writing they are proba- 
bly not more than two hundred miles from Peshawur, the most north- 
westerly British outpost. Able to meet the English in front with 
Persians, Afghans, and Cossacks, and to stir up a Mohammedan mu- 
tiny in their rear, the perilous days of British India seem to have 
come. And if, as diplomatic rumor runs, the French in Egypt, and 
the Russians in Persia, are ready to act in concert at the proper time, 
it is hard to say what defensive course the British can adopt. They 



620 THE NEW WOULD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

have been hitherto unable to obtain a practicable concession of the 
Euphrates route, owing, it is supposed to the influence of French 
Egypt upon Turkey. 

Egypt is nominally an hereditary Yiceroyalty of Turkey, its reign- 
ing family being descended from Mehemet Ali, a Turkish general ; 
but it is really more powerful than Turkey itself, having an army 
arranged and drilled by European tactics, and a navy of seventy-three 
vessels of war and transports. Its population is about five millions, 
and its chief cities, Cairo and Alexandria, contain, respectively, two 
hundred and fifty thousand and one hundred thousand inhabitants. 
France has loaned Egypt about forty millions of dollars ; and the 
Egyptian army is largely officered by Freoch emissaries and adven- 
turers. Turkey nominally controls thirty-five millions of people, but 
only two-thirds of these are, in any sense, Mohammedans, and there 
are so many mutinous Christians of the Russian church, and indepen- 
dent princes, and heterogenous tribes, that Turkey is in reality one of 
the weakest, most impoverished, and least effective states in the world. 
With a nominal army of one hundred and forty-eight thousand men, 
and three hundred thousand reserves, and with a navy of about forty 
wooden steamers and iron-clads, Turkey was obliged to seek the assist- 
ance of Egypt to suppress the Cretan revolt of 1868. Her finances 
stand lowest in Europe. The English have built her ships, and guar- 
anteed her loans, but she has even greater obligations to Eg} 7 pt, for 
the Eg3 x ptian tribute is all-essential to her, and Egypt, backed by 
either of the Great Powers, could speedily rise to opulence and power 
on the ruins of Turkey. The English have abundant reason to fear 
that notwithstanding the alliance of the Crimean war, France and Rus- 
sia mean to work in harmony, and leave England out " in the cold." 
Russia and France are commercially weaker than England ; their ob- 
jects and routes do not conflict with each other, but both conflict with 
England. They are both interested in seeing her defeated in opening 
the Euphrates railway, and they can work upon her through Turkey's 
obligations to Egypt. Many Englishmen are urging that the conces- 
sion of this route be forced from Turkey ; but a step so bold would 
probably lead to general warfare amongst the three great Jesuits and 
expose their double dealing. 

The study of this Eastern Question is complicated by a great schism 
between the orthodox and dissenting Mohammedans (Sonnites and 
Shiites) , who hate each other as fiercely as Greek and Catholic Chris- 
tians ; the Persians and Afghans are dissenters ; the Turks, Egyp- 



THE NEW WEST AND THE NEW EAST. 621 

tians, and Hindostans, are orthodox. Amongst them all, the military 
prowess of Russia is irresistible. 

u The vast experience of the Russians in wars, conducted alike 
upon the grandest and the most limited scale, — at one time carried 
on by great masses on the level and unobstructed plains of Europe, 
at another, by small detachments in the rugged mountains of Cauca- 
sus and Asia Minor, or on the frontiers of Tartary and China ; the 
great perfection to which military science has been carried in her 
schools and special corps ; the intelligence, skill, and courage they 
have so often evinced, both in attack and defence," * — all these con- 
siderations render probable what proportions a campaign between 
Western Europe and Russia would assume on the plains of Asia. 
England has grown well weary of contemplating a struggle of this 
magnitude, and her pacific attitude of late years has made the 
nations of the continent believe that she is anxious to retire from the 
field of European politics. An English author^, citing this super- 
stition, thus quotes it and comments upon it : — 

" ' If I were an Abyssinian, or a Hindoo, or even an American,' says 
the Frenchman, ' I might, perhaps, care what England thinks ; but 
being a European I do not.' A power that does not fight is no 
longer a power. She may still be summoned to European Con- 
gresses, — so is Turkey. Her envoys may be listened to with an 
affectation of respect, — so was the envoy of Greece. But the 
moment will come when each country of Europe has to support its 
counsel with the sword. France will throw hers into one scale, 
Prussia hers in another, and on one side or the other Russia will fling 
hers, and probably Austria hers, and even Italy hers. But England ! 
England knows, and Europe knows, that in that supreme moment 
the power which used to subsidize one-half the continent, and fight 
the other, must abandon the place which she has ceased to be able to 
maintain by force. She must renounce her political authority, and 
shelter herself behind an impotent neutrality. There are men in 
both parties like Mr. Bright, and Lord Stanley, who look forward 
contentedly to such an hour ; but the mass of Englishmen do not. 
They do not want to resume the old system of perpetual interference, 
but they want to be free to declare war, when interest or honor bid 
them." 

The extent of the jealousy of the English toward the Russians 
can be understood from Mr. Dilke's way of stating the Eastern 
* General George B. McClellan. 



622 THE NEW WOKLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

Question. " Drunken, dirty, ignorant, and corrupt, the Russian peo- 
ple are no fit rulers for Hindostan. A barbarous horde, ruled by a 
German Emperor and ministry, who are as little able to suppress 
degrading drunkenness and shameless venality, as they are them- 
selves desirous of promoting true enlightenment and education. Rus- 
sia must be beaten. A country that was fifty years conquering the 
Caucasus, and that could never place a disposable force of sixty 
thousand men in the Crimea, need give no fear to India, while her 
grandest offensive efforts would be ridiculed by America, or by the 
England of to-day." 

Thus does the same gentle author refer to the Suez Canal, and his 
French fellow-christians : — 

" It is evident enough that the Suez Canal scheme has been from the 
beginning a blind for the occupation of Egypt by France, and that, 
however interesting to the shareholders may be the question of its 
physical or commercial success, the probabilities of failure have had 
but little weight with the French government. The foundation of the 
Messagerie Company with national capital, to carry imaginary mails, 
secured the preponderance of French influence in the towns of Egypt. 

" The English railway-guards have latety been dismissed from the 
government railway line, and a huge tricolor floats from the entrance to 
the new docks at Suez, while a still more gigantic one waves over the 
hotel ; the King of Egypt, glad to find a third power which he can play 
off, when necessary, against both England and Russia, takes shares in 
the canal. It is when we ask, ' What is the end that the French have 
in view ? ' that we find it strangely small by the side of the means. 
The French of the present day appear to have no foreign policy, un- 
less it is a sort of desire to extend the empire of their language, their 
dance-tunes, and their fashions ; and the natural wish of their ruler 
to engage in no enterprise that will outlast his life prevents their 
having any such permanent policy as that of Russia or the United 
States. An Egyptian Pacha hardly put the truth too strongly when 
he said, 4 There is nothing permanent about France except Mabile.' " 

We may now profitably open the inquiry, What is the Pacific 
Ocean, and why do the nations struggle for supremacy in it? The 
venerable and vigorous Atlantic Ocean, on which Christian civilization 
first spread its sails, has been for nearly four hundred years the greatest 
of the world's highways. Columbus had crossed it twenty-one years 
before the Pacific was ploughed by Magellan ; it has borne over the 
seventy millions of men who people North and South America, and 



THE NEW WEST AND THE NEW EAST. 623 

yet to the newer ocean of the Pacific it is only a larger sort of strait, 
as narrow, between Brazil and Africa, as sixteen hundred miles, and 
at the widest only a fifth part of the earth's circumference. The 
Pacific, on which we are to try our fortunes, is at its greatest, — on 
the latitude of the Isthmus of Panama, — ten thousand and five hun- 
dred miles wide, and its area comprises two-fifths of the surface of 
the globe. The Pacific is in shape almost like a diamond, with the 
corner toward South America missing. The north-east side of the 
diamond is North America, the north-west side is Asia, the south- 
west side is the archipelago of the East Indies and Australia and 
New Zealand. Across the widest diameter, due west from Panama, 
is the riven isthmus of Malacca, through which the traders of Europe 
have been wont to sail on their way to China. Close to the centre 
of this ocean are the Sandwich Islands, where American influence has 
long been paramount. Due west of the United States is Japan ; on 
the latitude of Mexico is China ; on the latitude of Central Amer- 
ica is Cochin China ; the East India Islands are on the line of Peru ; 
Australia and New Zealand are on the latitude of Chili. Yeddo is 
nearly west of San Francisco, Pekin of Salt Lake City, Hong Kong 
of Havana, Manilla of Acapulco, Batavia of Pernambuco, Sydney of 
Valparaiso, and Melbourne of Concepcion. 

The American channel of the Pacific is nearly clear of islands, but 
they abound toward Southern Asia and Australia. New Zealand, 
the most isolated of all the great islands of the South Pacific, is 
almost equidistant from Hindostan and South Patagonia, and is as 
neighborly to the Southern polar Continent as to Australia, its British 
kinsman. Sailing due west from San Francisco, we reach Japan; the 
nearest mainland is China; descending the Chinese coast we come to 
Cochin China; beyond is Malacca, which turning, we enter the Indian 
Ocean, and reach Hindostan; off China in the Pacific lie the Philip- 
pines and numberless islands ; off Malacca are the mighty series of 
great islands, — the Great Antilles of the East, — Sumatra, Java, 
Borneo, New Guinea, and Australia, and at last New Zealand, standing 
sheerly off in the South Pacific. The struggle in Christendom, at 
present, is that which agitated the world before the discovery of 
America, — to possess this East. Let us, therefore, pass in crisp review 
the above several groups of land. 

Japan has an executive presumptive, educated in France. At its 
head is the Mikado, the divine Emperor, and the Tycoon, the hered- 
itary Executive ; the government is a sort of heathen England, with 



624 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

an immense aristocracy of Princes or Daimios, some of whom have 
revenues of four million dollars a year. The Japanese are the ablest 
nation of Asiatics ; they number almost as many people as the Ameri- 
cans, and their country is as large as all our Middle States. The 
Americans are the most popular foreigners in the empire, and have 
every reason to anticipate that the present intimate and profitable 
relations with Japan will grow closer and vaster every year. 

China is an absolute patriarchal government, deriving its religious 
traditions, like Japan, from the philosopher and school-teacher, Confu- 
cius. The population is said to be four hundred millions, the area one 
million three hundred square miles, and British influence is paramount 
in Chinese commerce. The products of Japan and China are much 
of the same sort : tea, tobacco, silk, and manufactured articles of 
steel, staples, and wood. At the most eligible part of the Chinese 
coast the British have an independent colony, Hong Kong. 

Hong Kong, the British " factory " in China, was ceded to Great 
Britain in 1841, and had a population in 1865 of one hundred and 
twenty-five thousand, two thousand of whom were Europeans ; it is 
an island, lying close under the China coast, of twenty-nine square 
miles' surface. 

Cochin China, where the French have played the same avaricious 
and unscrupulous part as the British in China, is a peninsula, south 
of China, and is said to contain thirty millions of people ; it is in 
products and civilization much like China. 

The Philippine Islands, opposite Cochin China, are twelve hundred 
in number, comprising one hundred and fifty thousand square miles 
of land, and inhabited by five millions of people. They are therefore 
as large as the six middle States of the United States, and two-thirds 
more populous than all New England. Spain partly holds the Phil- 
ippine Islands in subjection. Manilla, the capital, has one hundred 
and fifty thousand inhabitants, twenty thousand of whom are cheroot 
makers. The people are industrious, and many Chinese — the 
Anglo-Saxons of the East — are mixed with them. The revenue of 
these islands amounts to eleven millions of dollars annually, and the 
chief exports are sugar, tobacco, cigars, hemp, coffee, rice, dye woods, 
gold-dust, beeswax, and all tropical fruits. Americans and English 
divide the business of these islands, the former growing more formi- 
dable every year. The Philippine Islands are nearer to New York 
by San Francisco than to London by Suez. Papua, or New Guinea, 
between the Philippine Islands and Australia, is the second island 



THE NEW WEST AND THE NEW EAST. 625 

on the globe in greatness of dimensions, and is alternately mountain and 
swamp ; it is twelve hundred miles long and three hundred wide, 
contains eight hundred thousand natives, and is claimed by the 
Dutch ; but its deadly climate has not encouraged foreign occupa- 
tion, and its exports of ebony, pearls, spices, slaves, etc., go chiefly 
to the neighboring islands. 

Malacca, the most southerly tip of Asia, whose cape is nearly mid- 
way between British Calcutta and British Hong Kong, and is the 
half-way place between London and San Francisco by canal and sea, 
is a British colony forty by twenty-five miles in dimensions, with 
sixty thousand inhabitants, and productive of little, although fertile. 
Sumatra, separated by a navigable strait from the Malacca mainland, 
is a Dutch colony, with an area of one hundred and sixty-eight 
thousand square miles and seven millions of people, only two 
thousand of whom are Europeans ; it illustrates the prolific vegetation 
.and animal life of the East Indies, and its great staples are rice, 
coffee, oil, ivory, drugs, india-rubber, spices, and tobacco. At the 
southern end of Sumatra, separated by a strait, is Java, which 
extends to the neighborhood of Australia, and contains more people 
than all our middle States, one hundred and eighty thousand of 
-whom are Europeans, Chinese, and Arabians. It is the greatest 
Dutch possession, and in thirty years has sent to Holland one hun- 
dred and thirty million dollars. North of Java is Borneo, the third 
island in size in the world, or as large as Virginia, North Carolina, 
Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, and Arkansas together, yet with only 
two million five hundred thousand people. It has been but little 
explored, is unhealthy and very productive, contains all the precious 
metals and gems, has two hundred and fifty thousand Chinese, and 
is ruled jointly by Dutch, British, and natives. 

Australia is the Pacific coast of England, — her California, 
Nevada, Utah, and New Mexico, — the only one of her colonies 
which has bounded, like states of the American nation, from desola- 
tion to opulence. Australia is half as large as all South America. 
There are seven colonies in it, numbering unitedly (1862) one million 
three hundred and thirty-six thousand one hundred and thirty-one 
people. The Pacific States of America numbered at the same time 
about eight hundred thousand, but even at that time Australia's ratio 
of increase showed decline, while the American Pacific region was 
growing with undiminished vigor. Victoria, the most flourishing 
colony of Australia, contained five hundred and seventy-four thousand 
79 



626 THE SEW WCRLT) COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

people to California's three hundred and eighty thousand, and Mel- 
bourne, its capital, had one hundred and thirty-nine thousand nine 
hundred and sixteen inhabitants to San Francisco's one hundred and 
three thousand ; three thousand and twenty-three vessels of nine hundred 
and ninety-five thousand and eighty-two tons entered and cleared 
from Melbourne in 1861, and three thousand eight hundred and 
seventy vessels of one million three hundred and forty-two thousand 
two hundred and ninety tons entered and cleared from San Francisco 
in 1863. 

Sydney, the second city of Australia, contains ninety-four thou- 
sand people, aud has a university building five hundred feet long ; 
its bay is the best in Australia, and it may be called the Portland 
(Oregon) of the British Pacific coast. 

Australia has reached its present importance by the discovery of 
gold, by the gratuitous shipment of British people to it, which still 
continues, and by the influx of Germans and Chinese. But it§ 
resources and promise are not to be compared with the American 
Pacific ; it is a narrow reef of fertile land, enclosing an immense 
desert, so terrible that it has been proposed to pierce the reef and 
admit the ocean : it has no good harbors, and dangerous coasts ; at 
one stretch for seven hundred coast miles not a drop of fresh water 
flows into the sea : deluge and drouth alternate, so that once at 
Sydney it did not rain for thirteen months in 1838-9 ; at a later 
period travellers found in a dry river-bed the footmarks of people 
who had ascended it three years before to perish, and within the 
past three years one exploring party to the great interior desert, died 
of thirst with their camels, while a second party, sent after them, was 
nearly drowned by a flood. The rivers of Australia are unreliable : 
it has contributed no plant to agriculture, and its Avaters contain few 
fish. Its staple is wool, and it contains an immense number of 
merino sheep, but frequently thousands of these die of thirst or by 
the parching of the grass. Gold, coal, iron, and the metals distin- 
guish Australia like California, though in less abundance, and the 
American possessions have, in addition, the richest quicksilver mines 
in the world, magnificent timber forests, splendid rivers, and the 
fruits of all pleasant lands. 

There are but four hundred miles of railway in all Australia, — far 
less than the amount possessed by the infant State of Wisconsin. 

The sums spent upon the Victorian lines have deterred the colon- 
ists from completing their railway system ; £10,000,000 sterling 



THE NJEtf WEST AND THE NEW EAST. 627 

were spent upon two hundred miles of road, through easy country in 
which the land cost nothing. The United States have made nearly 
forty thousand miles of railroad, for less than £300,000,000 sterling ; 
Canada made her two thousand miles for £20,000,000, or ten times as 
much railroad as Victoria for only twice the money. Cuba has 
already more miles of railroad than all Australia. 

Xew Zealand is six thousand five hundred miles due west of South 
America, and twelve hundred miles south-east of Australia ; it con- 
sists of three islands with a total area of ninety-five thousand square 
miles, one hundred and seventy-five thousand white inhabitants 
(three-fifths males), and forty thousand fierce savages, who keep 
constantly employed seventeen thousand British troops. New Zea- 
land was settled by English and American whalers, who went ashore 
for shelter and provisions, and courted the native women ; the Brit- 
ish took formal possession in 1840. Xew Zealand is a more availa- 
ble colony for commercial uses than Australia, having good harbors 
and lands, water power, pleasant climate, and various cereals and 
fruits, the whole set in most noble sceneries, with mountains that 
reach the height of fourteen thousand feet. Xew Zealand is almost 
as large as Great Britain and Ireland, and it hopes to be the British 
island of the Southern Zone. Hokotika, its chief town, had, in 
1866, ten thousand people, having grown more rapidly than San 
Francisco ; gold was the magnet that drew the people to Xew Zea- 
land. 

Xow let us see what natural advantages America has to trade 
with the above regions. 

From London to Melbourne, Australia, via the Suez canal, is 
three thousand three hundred and seventy-nine miles further than 
from San Francisco to Melbourne, and three hundred and seventy- 
nine miles further than from Xew York by the Pacific Railroad. 
Yokohama, Japan, is six thousand nine hundred and eighty-four 
miles nearer San Francisco than London; Shanghai, China, four 
thousand nine hundred and fourteen miles nearer ; British Hong 
Kong, three thousand three hundred and fourteen miles nearer; 
Manilla, three thousand five hundred and four miles nearer ; and 
even British Singapore is four hundred and fifty-four miles nearer 
San Francisco than London. London, however, by Suez, is one 
thousand seven hundred and nineteen miles nearer Calcutta than is 
San Francisco. If war should ever close the Suez canal to England, 
Calcutta will be four thousand eight hundred miles further from Lon- 



628 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD* 

don than above, and Melbourne's distance will be increased three 
thousand miles. 

The part of our country that must directly compete for the trade 
of the East, is the States of the Pacific. 

The Pacific slope of the United States is one thousand miles long, 
and six hundred and eighty miles wide, with a shore line of two 
thousand two hundred and eighty-one miles, and two harbors which are 
scarcely surpassed on the globe. It has produced, since 1848, eleven 
hundred millions of dollars in gold, and its agricultural capacity is 
equal to the support of one hundred millions of inhabitants. 

What has the East to reward us for commercial enterprise? The 
soil of the Indies and of Southern Asia is characterized by a highly 
developed force, pervading vegetation, by which an abundance of 
aromatic and balsamic juices is yielded ; it is marked by a gorgeous 
vegetable and animal life, and the precious gems and metals are no 
less distinctive of its soil, than are the labor, the patience, and the in- 
genuity of its people. By looking over the commerce of the United 
States at the latest reports, we shall see that the products of the East 
are the chief objects of expenditure with us. 

Out of our total imports (one hundred and thirty-seven millions dol- 
lars) of 1869, the principal articles were, sugars seventy-three mil- 
lions, coffee twenty-five millions, iron and steel goods twenty-one 
millions, silk goods eighteen millions, dress goods fifteen millions, 
tea eleven millions, linen goods ten millions, flax above ten mil- 
lions, hides ten millions, wood seven and one-half millions. The 
chief articles of export, out of a total export of three hundred and 
forty-four millions, were cotton one hundred and sixty-two and one- 
half millions, petroleum thirty millions, tobacco twenty-five millions, 
wheat twenty-four millions, flour nineteen millions, lumber nine 
millions, lard nine millions. The imports exceeded the exports by 
ninety-three millions ; the duties on the imports were one hundred 
and fifty millions ; one half upon tea, coffee, sugar and molasses ; 
and eighteen thousand eight hundred and seventy-five foreign vessels 
were engaged in the whole trade above represented, to nine thousand 
nine hundred and seventy -four American vessels. The East is in want 
of just those things which we possess, and the basis of reciprocal trade 
is laid in nature. To show the prolific vegetation of the East it only 
needs to be remembered that, by the necessities of the American war, 
India cotton increased in amount from twenty-five million dollars in 
1859, to one hundred and ninety million dollars in 1864, and the pop- 



THE NEW WEST AND THE NEW EAST. 629 

ulation of the city of Bombay rose from four hundred thousand to one 
million. 

Southern Asia and the East India Islands produce about six mil- 
lions dollars of gold annually ; Australian gold was discovered by a 
returned California miner, and the total gold and silver yield of 
Australia and New Zealand in sixteen years has been nearly nine 
hundred million dollars. 

What have we clone to secure the trade of the East ? We have es- 
tablished a flourishing empire on the Pacific ; we have entangled our- 
selves in none of the jealousies of the Europeans in the East ; we 
have bribed nobody, and so have not a career of prosperity founded 
upon the perishable pinions of duplicity ; and we have set on the 
Pacific one of the greatest maritime companies of the earth, and con- 
nected it with the Atlantic by railroad. 

The Colorado, the first steamer of this China line, — which is lib- 
erally subsidized, — made her first voyage to Shanghai in twenty- 
seven days, and returned from Japan in twenty-one. The trade of 
America with China quadrupled the year this steamship line was in- 
troduced. The China steamer, America, for example, is three hun- 
dred and eighty feet long, fifty feet beam, has thirty-two feet depth 
of hold, and six decks. Her measurement is Q.ve thousand six hun- 
dred tons, and her engines are of two thousand horse-power. She 
was built by Steers, at Greenpoint, New York city, and is fitted up 
in magnificent style. 

What remains to be done ? 
. To deal generously and equally with Eastern people amongst us ; 
to respect their religion, their dress, and their peculiarities of man- 
ner, and to give them a chance. Also, to lose no time in purchasing 
the first right of way through the Isthmus of Central America, that 
we may not find ourselves outwitted like England, at Suez. Al- 
ready Europe is looking covetously toward this narrow bulwark, the 
remaining short cut to the Orient. 

In the spring of 1863, an Englishman, Captain Marshall, was in 
Paris, who entertained the idea of piercing the Isthmus of Panama, 
and was the author of a book called, " The Fate of the Pacific.'' On the 
eve of his leaving Paris, he sent a copy of his book to the Emperor, 
and, on the next morning, received an invitation to attend the Tuiler- 
ies. 

When he entered Napoleon's cabinet, he found him perusing the 
last pages of his work. As usual, Napoleon looked sorrowful and 



630 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

worn. "The man has but little rest and little amusement, and will 
not yet learn from the other princes how a monarch can render his 
life easy and agreeable." — " Your work has so interested me," said 
Napoleon, u that I have devoted a portion of the night to it. The 
Panama question is one of those, however, which have always occupied 
me, as you can convince yourself by looking over my books." Louis Na- 
poleon then went into all the details of the matter, and asked the 
captain whether he was disposed to take the bearings again on the 
spot. Captain Marshall replied, that he desired nothing more. The 
Emperor drew a draft on the banker, Pereire ; and, on the same even- 
ing, the Englishman proceeded to Havre, and thence to Central 
America. Lastly, to become absolute on the American Pacific, we 
must possess by persuasive means, the harbors of Vancouver, so as 
to be ready for that Pacific Railroad w r hich will unite Lake Superior 
with the India. Canada, thus losing the last chance of Empire in 
America, will close her eyes and take the inevitable separate leap. 

The latest English authority, Dilke, says : — 

" The future of the Pacific shores is inevitably brilliant ; but it is 
not New Zealand, the centre of the water hemisphere, w T hich will 
occupy the position that England has taken in the Atlantic, but some 
country such as Japan or Vancouver, jutting out into the ocean from 
Asia or from America. . . The political power of America in the 
Pacific appears predominant ; the Sandwich Islands are all but 
annexed ; Japan is all but ruled by her, while the occupation of 
British Columbia is but a matter of time, and a Mormon descent upon 
the Marquesas is already planned. The relations of America and 
Australia will be the key to the future of the South. 

" If, as is probable, Japan, New Zealand, and New South Wales, 
become great manufacturing communities, San Francisco must needs 
in time take rank as a second, if not a greater, London. 

" Russia and England are said to be nearing each other upon the 
Indus ; but long before they can meet there they will be face to face 
upon the Amoor ; Anglo-Saxon America representing England." 

In general terms we may conclude that up to the present hour the 
liberality of our institutions, the vigor of our race, and the resources 
of our empire, have made us the most generally enlightened people 
on the globe, and we impress mankind as being the safest, and the 
strongest of contemporary nations. No other government in North 
America can be said to be successful ; we are regarded in the South- 
ern American continent as the common friend and protector of all 



THE NEW WEST AND THE NEW EAST. 631 

there, and our American policy has been at all times positive, yet 
magnanimous.* In this prosperous period we shall find old friends 
presuming, and old enemies suave, and many offers will be made us 
to go into business, politics, intrigue, warfare, adventure. But all 
that we are, we have become single-handed, accepting for teachers 
the original precepts of our Republican Fathers ; and happy shall we 
be if we make all our national emulations subordinate to happiness 
and liberty, and guide our future foreign policy by the laws of sin- 
cerity, reciprocity, and peace. 

"Our commercial policy," said Washington, "should hold an 
equal and impartial hand ; neither seeking, nor granting exclusive 
favors or preferences, for it is folly in one nation to look for disin- 
terested favors from another, and it must pay with a portion of its 
independence for whatever it may accept under that character." 

* u In all history nothing can be found more dignified than the action of America upon 
the Monroe doctrine. Since the principle was first laid down in words, in 1823, the national 
behavior has been courteous, consistent, firm; and the language used now that America is 
all powerful, is the same that her statesmen made use of during the rebellion, in the hour 
of her most instant peril. It will be hard for political philosophers in the future to assert 
that a Democratic Republic can have no foreign policy." — DUke* 



CHAPTER XXIV. 

EUROPEAN AMERICA. 

A sketch of those portions of the Western Continent which are governed by European 
princes, or are subordinate to European influences : Spanish America, Brazil, and the 
subject West Indies — The commerce of our continent and the contestants for it — The 
American republics, our wards — Conclusion. 

If Africa and Arabia were out x>f the map, Asia would bear a 
noticeable resemblance to North America, and Australia to South 
America, the long-ruptured peninsula of Malacca, Sumatra, and 
Java answering to Panama and Central America, when we shall 
sever them by canals. Europe would be an exaggerated copy of 
Alaska, ravelling off into the western ocean ; Kamschatka is the 
counterpart of Greenland ; Japan of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia ; 
the Indies of the West and the East make archipelagoes between the 
two pairs of continents ; the United States would then correspond to 
the broad belt of China, Turkistan, Persia, and Asia Minor, Mexico 
to Hindostan, and Siberia to British America. There are six con- 
siderable governments in Australia as in South America. Patagonia 
terminates one continent as Van Diemen's Land the other. In the 
East India Archipelago as many nations are represented as in the 
West India Islands ; the Dutch government in Java is as avaricious 
as the Spanish in Cuba. 

The spirit of political independence is almost as active in Spanish 
South America as in English Australia, and self-dependence and 
dignity are correspondingly wanting in both. The capitals of Sydney, 
Melbourne and Adelaide, suggest the similar situations of Rio cle 
Janeiro, Buenos Ayres, and Valparaiso. Batavia is the Havana of 
the East Indies, Singapore the Panama. 

The dreams in which England has indulged as to her empire on the 
St. Lawrence, Russia is repeating upon the Amoor. Pekin and 
Washington are upon nearly the same line of latitude ; Havana and 
Hong Kong are upon another line ; Constantinople and San Francisco 
are also parallels. 

But Asia is almost all heathen, and America is almost entirely 

632 



EUROPEAN AMERICA. C33 

Christian. There are but three families of our race influential in 
America, — English, Spanish, and Portuguese. There are three races 
with infinite families in Asia, — Caucasian, Mongol, and Malay. 
Asia is ridden by Europe in the nineteenth century as tyrannically as 
America was ridden by Europe in the eighteenth. There is no dis- 
coverable unity of life, purpose, or coalition amongst the races of Asia ; 
Confucius, Mohammed, Brahma, Zoroaster, Buddha, have planted 
it with their traditions, and a tangled outgrowth of creeds inexplorable 
and indestructible as its jungles covers Asia with gorgeousness which 
is yet darkness. With a single clue like Aladdin's lamp, the European 
scholar explores, as in a cavern, the pathway of some seer or 
sage ; gems of thought, poesy, and science sparkle about him as he 
advances ; but the darkness closes up behind and before, and 
humanity despairs. In South and Central America the Christian 
faith, however misinterpreted, binds all the people to one ultimate 
civilization of " peace on earth and good-will to men." The feuds 
of Spanish America, which seem to us so frequent, bear no proportion 
to the interminable savage warfares of Asia, and are scarcely more 
bloody than the steady strifes of Europe, and they will be found in 
almost every case to arise, whatever be their pretexts, from the 
mortal collision between Americanism and Europeanism, between 
Society and Priest, Man and Prince, Equality and Vanity, Republic 
and Tradition. 

Let us arrive at some distinct notions of our continent. 

For all exterior purposes the United States acts through three 
cities, New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco. Quitting New 
York, southward, by sea, the nearest foreign soil is the Bermuda 
Islands, belonging to England, distant, say, eight hundred miles, and 
from England five thousand four hundred and fifty miles ; the next 
foreign port is Nassau, in the Bahama Islands, about nine hundred 
miles from New York, and six thousand two hundred and fifty-five 
miles from England, which also owns them. Nearly eleven hundred 
miles from New York is Havana, which is about seven hundred miles 
from New Orleans, and less than two hundred miles from an American 
post in Florida. Nassau and Bermuda are merely coaling and mili- 
tary stations for British trade and war ; they hang upon the verge 
of the United States, like groups of camp followers, to pick up a dis- 
honest living when we are too much engaged to attend to them. 
England maintains steamship connection with Bermuda from Halifax, 
and with Nassau from St. Thomas. 
80 



634 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

Havana is the third port in the North American seas in point of 
promise and position, ranking after New York and San Francisco, 
and while it could be put by rail and ferry via Florida within three 
days' journey of the capital of the United States, it is as far from us 
in freedom and influence as Spain, which is its master. It is a city 
of two hundred thousand people, holding the bones of Columbus, and 
it is the key to the American continent, distant from New Orleans no 
farther than from New York to Cleveland, from Vera Cruz not so 
far as from New York to Chicago, from Panama and from St. 
Thomas the distance of New Orleans from New York, while the 
island of Cuba, on which Havana stands, is only one hundred and 
twenty miles from the Mexican mainland, and one hundred and forty 
from the American. 

Standing at Havana one might be said to be at the most central 
city of the world ; he will be on the longitude of Columbus, Ohio, and 
of Macon, Georgia ; England will be six thousand five hundred miles 
distant ; the steamship routes to New Zealand, to San Francisco, to 
Japan, to Valparaiso, to Bio de Janeiro, to Spain, to New Orleans, 
to Mexico, and to New York, will converge at his feet. Wherever 
the isthmus between the two Americas may be cut, Havana will be 
the neighboring great city ; for it has the only great port in the trop- 
ics. It is this island which is engaged, while we write, in one of its 
many hopeless struggles with Spain, and it is doomed perhaps almost 
in the sight of our coasts, and despite our sympathies, to relapse into 
bondage anew. Here at Havana is the proper place to consider the 
condition of our continent, in relation to the United States and to 
Europe. 

Out of the entire population of America (seventy-five millions) 
the United States possesses fully one-half. Other English-speaking 
countries and colonies make nearly five millions more. Spanish coun- 
tries and colonies make about twenty-five millions. Portuguese Brazil 
possesses eight millions, and is somewhat stronger in numbers than 
Mexico. More than sixty millions are nominally republicans ; about 
twelve millions are adherents of monarchy ; the rest are merely colo- 
nists. Assuming the population of the globe at one billion, Ameri- 
cans of all sorts make more than one-thirteenth of mankind ; they 
have nearly four times the territory of Europe, and nearly a fourth 
of Europe's population. Great Britain, France, and Spain, together, 
outnumber all Americans between Alaska and Patagonia. 

The two great divisions of the American continent may be likened 



EUROPEAN AMERICA. 635 

to two large clusters of grapes, united by a jagged tendril ; the south- 
ern cluster is compact and symmetrical, and it is suspended much 
farther eastward than the larger and more ravelled northern conti- 
nent. There are six nations in the tendril between the two clusters, 
and there is also a web of islands spun, farther eastward, between the 
clusters. The tendril, quitting the United States on the Pacific side, 
comprises Mexico, Guatemala, San Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, 
Costa Rica, and it joins the southern cluster at New Granada. The 
web, quitting the United States at Florida on the Atlantic side, com- 
prises the Bahamas, the Great Antilles and the Little Antilles islands, 
and it is spun to the southern cluster at Venezuela. Between the 
web and the tendril lie two oval seas, the Gulf of Mexico and the 
Caribbean Sea, which are nearly sundered by the island of Cuba. 
The Gulf of Mexico is five times the size of the Baltic Sea, and is en- 
compassed by three states only, the United States, Mexico, and Cuba, 

The Caribbean Sea is the greatest inlet on the Western Hemi- 
sphere, sixteen hundred miles wide by one thousand miles in diameter, 
and it empties into the Gulf Stream with the force of three thousand 
Mississippi Rivers, drawing upon the South Atlantic Ocean to supply 
this volume, and therefore the waters of the Amazon and Orinoco 
Rivers really flow into the Gulf of Mexico, return round Florida, and 
sweep along the coast of the United States northward, warming our air 
and mitigating our climate. In fact, therefore, the Gulf is the pool of the 
Mississippi and Rio Grande, while the Caribbean Sea is the pool of 
the Amazon and Orinoco ; the river which they both form is the 
ocean river of the Gulf Stream, whose shores are civilization. 

In this web of islands, the West Indies, began the life of both 
Americas. There Columbus saw land ; there Spain began her bane- 
ful and brilliant Western Empire ; thence Cortez departed for Mexico, 
De Soto for the Mississippi, Balboa for the Pacific, and Pizarro for 
Peru. The history of the United States was separated by a benefi- 
cent Providence far from this wild and cruel history of the rest of the con- 
tinent, and, like a silent seed, we grew into empire, while empire itself, 
beginning in the South, was swept b} r so interminable hurricane that 
what of its history we can ascertain is read by the very lightnings 
that devastated it. The growth of English America may be likened 
to a series of lyrics sung by separate singers, which coalescing at last 
make a vigorous chorus, and this, attracting many from afar, swells 
and is prolonged, until presently it assumes the dignity and proportions 
of epic song. Spanish America began like the celebration of a wonr 



636 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

drous mass ; the relics, the trophies, the perfumes, and the gorgeous- 
ness of the highest piety and power were expressed in it. To its 
proportions the Israelitish song on the farther shore of the Red Sea 
was the anthem of a handful of savages. But in the ecstasy of the 
celebration, frenzy came over the singers; the hyssop 'ran blood; 
blasphemy took the place of praise, and the coals from the overthrown 
altar set the cathedral aflame. The first tragedy was the massacre 
of the innocent natives, or their reduction to slavery ; the second was 
the fruit of the monopoly of all the New World claimed by Spain, 
whereby the Buccaneers of other nations ravaged the Spanish coasts 
for one hundred and seventy years, and left the pirates for their prog- 
eny ; the third was the introduction of African slavery ; the fourth 
was the universal revolution against Spain ; the fifth was the war of 
races, and the present is the war of all these precedents. 
• When the English settled America they were new experimenters on 
the seas ; when the Dutch settled it they were a new nation, snatched 
from the jaws of Spain ; when the Portuguese settled it they were 
flushed with their great achievement of doubling the Cape of Good 
Hope, and ardent for larger dominions ; when the French settled it 
they were the nation of military chivalry, without other purpose than 
not to be all forestalled ; but when the Spanish settled it they bore 
title-deeds from God, stamped by his vicar, to reward them for sav- 
ing his earthly kingdom from Jew, heretic, and infidel. Not coloni- 
zation, but treasure, was their object ; not a home, but only gold. They 
were the best sailors and soldiers of Europe, and while they ran- 
sacked the new hemisphere for the precious gems and metals, they of- 
fered land to the apostate Jews and Moors of Spain, that these might 
make food to sustain the Spanish soldiery. These and other rene- 
gades made the pilgrim fathers of Spanish America, and having no 
women to marry they cohabited with Indians. Priests in multitude 
soon appeared to convert savage and half-breed ; the Pilgrim fathers 
hung out the sign of the three golden balls, and when the Spanish 
troops, laden with gold and gems, reappeared, they gambled them 
away, or parted with them to these pawnbrokers. A race with scarcely 
a civilized component in it sprang up, — negro, Indian, Jewish, Moor- 
ish, Spanish, — and not a ray of light fell upon this offspring of lust 
and greed but what the church afforded, and the church itself shared 
in the lust and avarice of the time and clime. Three aristocracies 
appeared after a chaos of crime and war, wherein every nation of 
Europe had taken part, — rich tradesmen and planters of renegade 



EUROPEAN AMERICA. 637 

descent, Spanish officeholders and their descendants, and Spanish 
churchmen, — all indolent, proud, and rich, in the midst of slavery. 
But, gorged with greed, broken by the climate and by excesses, the 
Spanish race was also changed, and when the great upheaval of 
the French. Revolution came, Spain, the mother country, was ihe easy 
prey of her neighbors : her Kings were set aside, her soil overrun, 
and her colonies revolted. We can imagine the dignity of the 
Spanish American revolutions by the races which performed them. La- 
den with ten times the burdens of the British colonies, the Spanish Amer- 
icans took up arms at first, not for freedom, but for the deposed Spanish 
King. Their torch of liberty was lighted at length, not from America, 
but from France. Yet their ally was not France, but England ; for 
when Napoleon was overthrown, the English, studying the situation 
in the light of profit and loss, concluded to ally themselves with 
Portugal and with the Spanish republics, as against France and Spain, 
now allies. Therefore English adventurers and English secret 
money were the life of the war of independence in the South. The 
naval hero of Peru and Chili was the same Lord Cochrane whom we 
have seen, in a previous chapter, expelled from Parliament. Miranda 
and Bolivar, South American leaders, always had British protection 
in the last resort. And one of the earliest powers to recognize 
the independence of our neighbors was England. In this pol- 
icy England has learned that a service to freedom is never without 
profit ; for her hold upon the trade and affection of Brazil and Span- 
ish America generally is complete, and she has felt the return wave 
of benefit in her own ameliorated charity and constitution. British 
capital yields in no place safer returns than in South American in- 
vestments, and her material influence in our tropics and southern 
hemisphere very nearly balances our own moral influence. Still the 
great sympathetic fact even in these devastated republics is that we 
are not only a variety of Englishmen, but also the great republic. 

Let us now proceed to review the countries to the south of us. 
And first the West Indies, as the key to the tropic mainland. 

Cuba has more area than South Carolina, and more inhabitants 
than Virginia, these latter constituting one-fourth of all the colonial 
subjects of Spain, now five millions in number, or less than one-third 
the number in Spain herself. Half the one million three hundred and 
fifty-nine thousand people of Cuba are whites, and more than a fourth 
slaves. Cuba is as long as from Boston to Detroit, and of only forty 
miles' average breadth. Its long mountain range reaches heights of 



638 THE NEW WOKLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

six thousand nine hundred feet ; its railways date back to 1838, and 
are now quite numerous. Only nine thousand of its children go to 
school. It has been permanently settled for more than three centuries 
and a half. Its government is a despotism, in the Spanish rendering 
of the word, and despotism aggravated by corruption. More than a 
hundred years ago, the English took Havana by siege and assault. 
Havana contains two hundred thousand people, and ranks tenth 
amongst cities of population on the American continents, while in 
position and harbor it is second to none. 

Hayti, east of Spain, is nearly the size of Scotland, or of South 
Carolina, and it has nearly the population of Wisconsin. In 1843 
the island divided into two governments, Hayti, Negro French, French 
and Dominica, Negro Spanish, Spanish, both anarchies and des- 
potisms, alternately, and the United States has been repeatedly 
offered the protectorate or purchase of both. 

Porto* Rico is half the size of Massachusetts, and has half as 
many people as Georgia. Half the imports and exports are from 
Great Britain. It is Spanish and slave. 

Jamaica, the largest British island in the West Indies, is smaller 
than Massachusetts, and has about the population of West Virginia. 
It lies south of Cuba. As a colony of note, the English pronounce 
it a failure, and their administration of it, coupled with the name of 
Eyre, its satrap, is a reproach to them. 

The lesser islands of the West Indies reach up to Florida, — the 
Bahamas, and down to Venezuela, — the windward and leeward " Les- 
ser Antilles/' In possession they are either Danish, British, French, 
Dutch, Swedish, or Venezuelan. 

The Swedish island of St. Bartholomew — her only colony — has 
eighteen thousand people, and an area of- thirty-five square miles, 
and here slavery was abolished in 1848. Sweden was the first anti- 
slavery state. 

The Danish islands are St. Thomas, St. Croix, and St. John. St. 
Thomas is the great entrepot for British steamers, and the focus of 
their radiating lines, and it has a commodious harbor. It stands in 
the elbow of the Antilles, nearest Europe, and its people, with de- 
cided enthusiasm, voted to be annexed to the United States, in 1868, 
notwithstanding British commercial influence. The Dutch islands 
are Saba, St. Eustatius, Buen Ay re, Curacoa, and Oruba. They are 
in nothing considerable, except as exhibiting the hard, stolid govern- 
ment of the Dutch, which has been compared to the respect felt by 



EUROPEAN AMERICA. 639 

the fish for Jonah, in its belly. The French islands are Deseada, 
Guadeloupe, Marie Galante, and Martinique. St. Martin belongs to 
both French and Dutch. The French are the best-regulated islands in 
the West Indies ; their occupants are citizens of them, not mere traders 
in them. Martinique was the native land of Bonaparte's Josephine, 
and is fifty miles long by sixteen wide. The British islands are 
Barbuda, St. Christopher, Antigua, Dominica, St. Lucia, Barba-' 
does, St. Vincent, and Trinidad. Barbadoes is populous, enlight- 
ened, has newspapers, and is freer from storms than its neighbors. 
Magarita and Tortuga are the principal Venezuelan islands. All 
these islands produce sugar, tobacco, rum, and the other luxuries. 

The main land of Southern North America is, in misfortunes, a 
proper preface to the history of Spanish America. Mexico is a fed- 
erative Republic of nineteen States, each State with a Legislature, 
and the President and Vice-President are elected by a federal Con- 
gress. Juarez, at present the President, and as well known for his 
virtues as Lopez of Paraguay for his crimes, was born in 1807. The 
nation was established in 1821 ; its area is about equal to all that 
part of the United States east of the Mississippi River, and its pop- 
ulation is about one-fifth of ours. In 1866 the revenue was sixteen 
and one-half million dollars, and the expenditure nearly double. 
The debt, according to Juarez' computation, was thirty-five million 
dollars, while the French government, and its gamblers in Mexican 
concerns, claimed the liabilities of the republic to be three hundred 
and twenty million dollars. Napoleon even claims the cost of the 
war he made against the Mexicans to be a Mexican obligation. It 
will lie more heavily upon the conscience and the solvenc}^ of his 
own reign. The pure whites of Mexico are only three hundred thou- 
sand in number. The President is an Indian. Mexico is shortly to 
open a line of railway from Mexico city to Vera Cruz, three hundred 
miles. The celebrated Tehuantepec ship canal route passes through 
southern Mexico. M. Michael Chevalier thinks it the best. 

Guatemala, the next neighbor to Mexico, is larger than Louisi- 
ana, and nearly as populous as North Carolina ; it is an oligarchy, 
with a petty tyrant at the head of it, and maybe considered,- scarcely 
excepting Paraguay, as the worst government in America. The Jesuits 
are all powerful ; the English do three-fourths of all the commercial 
business. The capital city contains sixty thousand people. Through 
this state a ship canal is contemplated by foreign engineers. Balize, 



640 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

a coast strip of Guatemala, is an English colony of twenty thousand 
people, double the area of New Jersey. 

Honduras is nearly as large as Pennsylvania, and has more inhab- 
itants than New Hampshire ; it is a republic. Nicaragua, the state 
which sought the aid of General William Walker in 1855, is a semi- 
liberal republic, with the population of Arkansas, and the area of 
Michigan ; through it passes the American route to the Pacific, called 
by the name of the state. 

San Salvador is a small state on the Pacific coast, larger than New 
Hampshire, and with three hundred thousand people. It has the 
highest population in Central America. 

Costa Rica, the last state in North America, going southward, 
contains half as many people as Connecticut, and is half the size of 
Maine ; it has a revenue of about one hundred thousand dollars, and 
three-fourths of its imports came from England. Hon. E. G. Squier 
is the best authority on Central America. 

New Grenada, next beyond Costa Rica, the nearest state in South 
America, has as many people as Ohio, and as much land as Texas, 
Louisiana, and Mississippi together. It is one of the most liberal and 
enlightened states in South America, and its government is a federal 
union of state sovereignties, almost precisely like the United States. 
The great sites of Panama and Carthagena are in the Granadian 
confederation. There is every variety of climate in it ; the Andes moun- 
tains rise to the heighth of eighteen thousand feet, and through their 
ridges run the Rivers Magclalena and Cauca, navigable for five hundred 
miles, northward to the Caribbean Sea. Bogota, the capital, stands 
higher above the sea than the highest passes of the Alps, } r et in per- 
petual salubrity, the Magdalena and the great River Orinoco flowing 
from the foot of its plateau to outlets twelve hundred miles apart ; it 
has forty thousand people, and is very picturesque ; the fare from the 
Caribbean coast to Bogota is said to be one hundred and thirty dol- 
lars in specie. 

Venezuela, the next state to the east, is more than ten times the 
size of Ohio, and has more than the population of Massachusetts, 
and it has a coast line of sixteen hundred miles. Its exports 
amount to six and a half million dollars annually ; its interior is 
forest and mountain, in great part unexplored, and the tropical ani- 
mals are found in the jungles and morasses of the Orinoco, which, 
flowing parallel to the sea, empties its great bulk of nineteen hun- 
dred and sixty miles, by many mouths, into the ocean between British 



EUROPEAN AMERICA. 641 

Guiana and British Trinidad. The Orinoco is navigable to Angos- 
tura. Caraccas, the city of Bolivar and earthquakes, has forty thou- 
sand people, and stands sixteen miles from its Caribbean seaport, 
La Guayra, which has but six thousand people. Trinidad, an English 
island above referred to, is nearly half the size of Connecticut, and has 
nearly the population of the District of Columbia ; it is the second 
British West India island in importance, and its chief town, the Port 
of Spain, is one of the finest in the whole archipelago. Angostura 
is the Venezuelan chief city of the Orinoco, two hundred and fifty 
miles from the sea, and with water two hundred and fifty feet deep 
at the city ; it is now recovering from the long night of civil war. 

Simon Bolivar the "Liberator" of Northern South America died 
in 1830, at the age of forty-seven. He had wealth, family, and edu- 
cation, corresponding to Washington's. In 1816 he proclaimed the 
abolition of slavery, — probably the first to do so on the continent. 
He liberated Venezuela, New Grenada, and Peru, and Bolivia is named 
for him. As a soldier, he was famed for his perseverance and his 
long marches ; as a statesman, he had well-meant egotism, and little 
judgment. His memory is revered, but he was in nothing like Wash- 
ington, to whom he has been compared. Bolivar is said to have writ- 
ten late in life, to General Flores, of Ecuador : " This country will 
inevitably fall into the hands of the unbridled rabble, and become 
the prey of petty tyrants of all colors and races. The Europeans will 
not deem it worth while to conquer us. America for us is ungovern- 
able." 

Guiana, the territory on the Atlantic coast between Venezuela and 
Brazil, is in many respects a counterpart of Louisiana ; a rich, un- 
healthy delta-land along the Atlantic, with muddy and yielding banks 
and streams, which come down from savage interiors laden with 
detritus. The British, Dutch, and French divide amongst them this 
region, the French making it a depot for their most infamous crimi- 
nals, and their most eminent patriots. The French part is large as Ohio, 
and contains twenty-five thousand people, and it is the only main- 
land of the American continent held by France. Dutch Guiana is 
large as Tennessee, and has half the population of Delaware ; through 
Parimaribo its capital, with eighteen thousand inhabitants, Dutch 
Guiana does a great trade with the United States. British Guiana 
is about the size of Maryland, though the English claim land enough 
from Brazil and Venezuela to make it big as Kansas ; sugar, rum, and 
timber are its products ; it contains one hundred and fifty thousand 
81 



642 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

people, and its capital, Georgetown, with twenty-five thousand peo- 
ple, is intersected by canals, like Amsterdam. Dutch task-master- 
ship and greed have left imprint over all Guiana, and we can imagine, 
from the present condition of the country, what New York might 
have looked like had it continued a Dutch Colony. 

Let us now, from the margin of Brazil, retrace to Panama, cross the 
American railroad, and descend the line of nations on the Pacific 
coast. First Ecuador, nearly five times the size of New England, 
and with the population of New Jersey, Guayaquil for its port, 
Quito for its capital, one of the dullest states, even in South 
America. 

Quito stands in the air half as high again as the Tip-Top House on 
Mt. Washington, and at two-thirds the height of Mont Blanc. It has 
fifty thousand people, is very difficult of access, and its port of 
Guyaquil, itself sixty miles from the ocean, is two hundred miles 
distant. Mr. Frederick Hassaurek, our late minister resident there, 
reports that one hundred and twenty pianos have been dragged to 
that difficult height, that the people conceive the only great nation 
besides themselves to be the French, and that, lying upon the Equator, 
nature is yet more attractive there than man. Guyaquil stands on 
the best river on the Pacific coast of South America ; the river is 
navigated by American steamers, and the town of twenty thousand 
people is lighted by American gas, preserved by a Baltimore steam 
fire-engine, and made occasionally noisy by an American iron foun- 
dry. But the English do the commerce. % 

Peru, the ancient El Dorado, commemorated so well by Prescott, 
is now in as sorry plight as Rome to bear so rich a name. Peru has 
more than twice the area of Texas, and more than ten times that of 
New York, while its population is nearly equal to Ohio's ; its coast 
line is one thousand six hundred miles long, but it has not a single 
good harbor. Guano islands, lying in Peruvian waters, contain, even 
at present, it is thought, fifteen millions of tons, and good guano sells 
for sixty-five dollars a ton in England. Peru has mountains which 
reach the altitude of twenty-two thousand feet, and cities, like Cuzco, 
higher than the Great St. Bernard. Among the valuable deposits of 
Peru is nitrate of soda, a powerful fertilizer, of which there are sixty- 
three million tons in the country. Guano absolutely supports the 
state of Peru, its revenue of twenty-one and one-fourth million 
dollars, in 1862, being three-fourths obtained from the sale of 
this article. The Republic, like Elijah, is fed by the ravens. The 



EUKOPEAN AMERICA. 643 

whole of Peru's debt of one hundred and fifteen million dollars is secured 
by these guano islands. Here is a beneficent bird of freedom, indeed, 
which not only perches on the standard of Peru, but lends it money. 
There is no religious toleration in Peru, and though the constitution 
is based upon that of the United States, the exceptions seem to make 
the government. Here, then, is a rich country a beggar, for want of 
peace and enterprise. 

Lima, the capital, the handsomest of Pacific coast cities, is six 
miles from the ocean port of Callao, with which it is connected by a 
railroad, owned by three persons, and this is said to net them fifteen 
thousand dollars a day. It has a very agreeable climate, and one 
hundred thousand people. Peruvian steamers connect at the border 
of Brazil with Brazilian steamers on the Amazon, and ascend to Jaen, 
only two hundred miles from the Pacific coast, or twenty-four hun- 
dred from the mouth of the Amazon ! 

Bolivia has the population of Illinois, and the area of all our 
Atlantic and Gulf Southern States, except Texas. It has no seaport 
worth speaking of, and only a desert sea-coast on the Pacific, its 
natural outlet being the Amazon also. Its capital, Chuquisaca, with 
twenty-five thousand people, stands nine thousand feet above the sea 
in a territory of silver mines, and its second city, Potosi, with thirty 
thousand people, stands four thousand feet higher, on a mountain 
pierced with five thousand mines, which has yielded two billion 
dollars, and its deposits are inexhaustible. Bolivia is the South 
American Minnesota, the La Plata rising in it as well as the Amazon. 

Chili is a long veneered and bevelled strip of Pacific coast and 
Andes, one hundred and twenty miles wide and ten times longer, lying 
in the relative southern latitude of California. It is undoubtedly the 
most prosperous republic in South America, and, with the area of New 
York, New England, and Pennsylvania, has the population of Massa- 
chusetts and Connecticut. It has several seaports, chief of which is Val- 
paraiso, with nearly one hundred thousand people, situated ninety miles 
from Santiago, the capital. In 1866 the Spanish bombarded it, and 
destroyed ten million dollars' worth of property. Santiago is grandly 
and beautifully situated on a terrace of the Andes, and is in social 
complacency and education the Boston of South America, with a rich 
population of one hundred and ten thousand. A sketch of Chiji was 
published by D. J. Hunter, in New York, as late as 1866. 

The Chilian President is elected by Electors, as with us, and holds 
five years. The Senators, twenty in number, sit nine years ; the 



644: THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

Deputies (Representatives) sit three years. The President has four 
Cabinet Ministers, and also an auditory Council, composed of cabi- 
net, judges, ecclesiastics, and civilians. It will thus be perceived 
that the Chilian government is less representative than ours. The 
railways of Chili are four hundred miles in length, and will soon be 
one thousand miles ; and the merchant marine comprises two hundred 
and sixty vessels and three thousand soldiers. Two thousand Ger- 
mans have settled in Chili, and are active politicians ; December, 
January, and February are the summer time there ; the people are 
scarcely taxed at all ; tobacco is a government monopoly ; American 
patents are popular ; the mint of Santiago is the finest edifice in 
South America ; a Yankee established the first printing-office in 1812 ; 
the state has a homestead law ; it is proposed to stretch an American 
telegraph on land from Panama to Valparaiso ; the portraits of Wash- 
ington and Lincoln are placed side by side in the Chilian Foreign 
Office by law ; an American town in Chili is Caldera, with a railroad 
fifty miles long leading to silver and copper mines ; religious tolera- 
tion was stingily granted in Chili very recently. 

Patagonia, which terminates the continent of South America, con- 
tains one hundred and twenty thousand people, or one being to three 
square miles, and is a region of desolate steppes and of volcanoes, inter- 
sected by the broad Straits of Magellan, where the Chilians are" about 
to put tow-boats to speed vessel navigation. These straits are three 
hundred miles long and from five to thirty miles wide. Off these 
straits in the Atlantic are the Falkland Isles, two hundred in number, 
with the aggregate area of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connect- 
icut, belonging to England, and settled, to be of use to her commerce, 
as late as 1833 ; they now contain seven hundred people. These are 
the only settled islands in the Southern oceans, except Juan Fernan- 
dez, four hundred miles off Chili, settled by Americans and Sandwich 
Islanders, and the St. Felix isles, also in the Pacific. The Galapagos 
Islands are on the equator, almost due south of New Orleans. The 
Cape Verde islands stand in the Atlantic between the mouths of the 
Amazon and the Mediterranean, nearly midway, and the Azores 
between the mouths of the Mediterranean and the Chesapeake. Turn- 
ing into the Atlantic Ocean and ascending, we come to the Argentine 
Republic, lying between Chili and the great River La Plata, the 
noblest of South American streams. Two cities hold the gulfy out- 
let of the La Plata, — Montevideo in Uruguay, and Buenos Ayres in 
the Argentine State. 



EUROPEAN AMERICA. 615 

The Argentine Republic, which is the Chili of the Atlantic coast, 
has as great a population as Missouri, and it is nearly five times the 
size of all our Middle States. There are eighty thousand Italians in 
it, and sixty thousand French and pure Spanish. .Its foreign debt is 
owing mainly to the English and the Brazilians, and the English 
have subscribed nearty the whole capital for its six hundred and 
fifty miles of railroad projected or accomplished. The city of Buenos 
Ayres once beat off the English ; vessels must anchor at low water 
there from five to nine miles off shore, and at high water from a mile to 
three miles ; the population of the city is one hundred and twenty-five 
thousand, and French and English newspapers are published. 

Uruguay, probably to be soon absorbed by Brazil, or to lead to 
another war between Spanish and Portuguese South America, is 
nearly as large as the two Carolinas, and has about one-third the pop- 
ulation of South Carolina. In 1865 Uruguay exported first in quan- 
tity to France, second to England, third to Italy, and fifth to the 
United States. Montevideo, its capital, has nearly fifty thousand 
people. The La Plata River has three great arms inland, two of which 
pierce to the depths of Brazil, and yet both flow to sea through 
Uruguay and the Argentine Republic ; caught between the forks of 
the upper two, seven hundred miles from the sea, is the so-called repub- 
lic of Paraguay, which is ten times the size of Massachusetts, and as 
populous as Indiana ; one half the state belongs to the bloody dictator 
Lopez, one of those demons of wickedness who choose the name 
of republic to make mankind despise it. He inherited the country 
from his father, who had it willed to him by the executors of the 
fiendish Francia, the first usurper of the republic. Paraguay is the 
most despotic state on the American continent, and it is about pass- 
ing into the hands of its own people, unless its conquerors quarrel 
over it and Brazil succeeds in annexing the whole as well as Uruguay. 
The quarrel on the La Plata is primarily between the Portuguese 
and Spanish Atlantic empires, intensified by the desire of the Bra- 
zilians to have the free navigation of the La Plata, and by the efforts 
of despots, like Rosas and Lopez, to prevent it. The behavior of 
Paraguay, however, was as insufferable to her Spanish allies as to 
Brazil, and they have made common cause against Lopez. Two 
American Ministers disagreeing in this war, we may take the opin- 
ion of Professor Agassiz : — 

" In her conflict with Paraguay, Brazil may truly be counted 
among the standard-bearers of civilization. The facts which have 



64:6 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

-come to my knowledge respecting this war have convinced me that it 
originated in honorable purposes, and, setting aside the selfish 
intrigues of individuals, inevitably connected with such movements, 
is carried on w* ith disinterestedness. It deserves the sympathy of 
the civilized world ; for it strikes at a tyrannical organization, half 
clerical, half military, which, calling itself a republic, disgraces the 
name it assumes." 

Brazil is two thousand six hundred miles long, and two thousand 
five hundred miles broad, not so broad as the United States by three 
hundred and fifty miles, but longer from north to south by one thou- 
sand miles, exclusive of Alaska. Brazil has nearly one hundred 
thousand square miles more area than the United States, but, count- 
ing Alaska, we have about five hundred thousand square miles in ex- 
cess. It has been settled about three hundred and forty years, 
and has a population of eight millions, or less than that of New 
York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio combined. It forms a frontier of every 
nation in South America but one, Chili, and is, generally speaking, 
exempt from the drouths and earthquakes which annoy them. In 
1868 its public debt was about two hundred and forty million dol- 
lars, and its expenditure was double its revenue. It is the only 
large state in Christendom which maintains slavery at home, only half 
its population being free, and it has fewer children at school than the 
State of Iowa. Its river system, long unimproved, has been at 
length opened to the world, but the La Plata River, which is the 
Mississippi of the South Temperate Zone, debouches through foreign 
states, and in time of sullenness or war is closed to Brazil. Three 
or four railways penetrate a little distance into the country from the 
coast ; the humid soil and luxurious vegetation make good common 
roads almost impossible. The exports of Brazil are valued (1860) at 
about sixty-five million dollars, or one-sixth of those of the United 
States. Immense portions of the interior are unexplored ; the mouth 
of the greatest river of Brazil is directly on the line of the equator ; 
the capital, Rio de Janeiro, is upon a latitude corresponding to that of 
Havana in our hemisphere, and is the largest city of South America, 
with the population of Baltimore. Its harbor is superior to those of 
New York, San Francisco, or Havana, being only a mile wide at the 
outlet, very deep, and girdled with mountains, while its surface of 
seventeen miles by twelve, is made picturesque by islands, one of 
which is nearly half the size of New York Island. 

Rio stands four miles from the ocean around seven hills, like Rome. 



EUROPEAN AMERICA. 647 

A mountain within sight sends fresh water by an aqueduct ; gas 
lights the streets, fountains play in the squares ; opera, libraries, and 
colleges exist as in our northern cities ; the city has been the capital 
since 1822, when Brazil became independent. Bahia City, also on 
the coast, has one hundred and twenty-five thousand people ; Pernam- 
buco, the sugar-mart, one hundred thousand, and Para, at the mouth 
of the Amazon, thirty thousand. The Amazon River drains an ex- 
tent of country equal to all Europe, and affords inland navigation of 
fifty thousand miles, twice the circumference of the globe ; from its 
sources the Pacific Ocean is visible ; it is navigable for three thou- 
sand three hundred and sixty miles from the Atlantic ! }^et its sea- 
port, Para, does a business in imports and exports amounting to only 
two millions of dollars yearly. It requires two weeks to ascend the 
Amazon to the Peruvian line ; poor steamers traverse it, but the Eng- 
lish are already preparing to make it a highway. There is not a 
decent hotel nor a large town on the river ; mosquitoes are its bane ; 
the river bottom is unreliable. The Brazilian people are a weak race, 
with poor morals, worse courage, and abominable nastiness. The 
virility of the children is lost by the proximity of slaves and the uni- 
versal incontinence ; the Spanish allies of Brazil on the La Plata 
despise the morals of the latter' s soldiery. What of strength there 
is in the nation is a popular and prudent ruler, and good foreign 
advisers, chiefly English. The nation has never passed through the 
bloody centuries of its Spanish neighbors, and peace has generally 
favored it. It was a colony of Portugal till 1807, when Bonaparte 
invading the mother country, the royal family set sail, and raised the 
throne anew in Brazil. The King of Spain was at the same time on 
the point of sailing for Peru. When the time came to return to Por- 
tugal, the King was loth to make the exchange, and he finally endeav- 
ored to marry his daughter to her uncle, and so keep Portugal in the 
family, while his son Pedro kept Brazil. Pedro was unfortunate and 
was driven out, and the present well-behaved King is his son, Pedro 
II. A branch of the family still keeps Portugal, also, and the English, 
whose bond of attachment is port wine and bills of lading, are the pat- 
rons of both countries. King Pedro II., of Brazil, is allied by marriage 
with the Orleans family of France, and his wife is the sister of 
" Bomba," ex-tyrant of the Sicilies. His salary is four hundred 
thousand dollars a year, and his wife's fifty thousand dollars. The 
palace in Rio is an old stone and stucco building, painted yellow, two 
and three stories high, a hundred feet wide, and six hundred feet deep, 



648 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

connected by a gallery with the royal library and chapel. Here all 
the court ceremony of the Braganzas is kept up, — a guard of 
halberdiers, state liveries of green trimmed with silver, lancers, 
state coaches, robing rooms. 

Brazilian Senators are selected by the Emperor from a number 
nominated in election by the people. The Representatives are not 
directly elected. Every inscribed voter must vote under penalty. 
Only Catholics can be Representatives. There are seven ministers, 
— one of " Justice." The police administration of Brazil is despotic. 
People are impressed into the army. The " native " race is upper- 
most. Titles of nobility are not hereditary. 

The railroad from Rio to the River Parahyba, sixty-seven miles, was 
built by American engineers. The first steamer of the Pacific Mail 
Company which sailed to China took, on her maiden trip from New 
York, Louis Agassiz and a company of American naturalists, who 
explored the Amazon. Agassiz introduced the American lyceum 
lectures into Brazil, and for the first time the ladies there attended 
them. Mrs. Agassiz ascribes the evils of Brazil to slavery, to the 
character of the clergy, to the want of -education, to Portuguese civili- 
zation, and to the non-popular form of the government. 

There remains to be considered only the influence of the United 
States in the waters of America. England is now the leading power 
amongst our associate republics. Let us instance her steamship 
lines. 

And first, the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, with head- 
quarters at Southampton, England ; it has an annual aggregate sub- 
sidy from the British government of one million three hundred and 
fifty thousand dollars, and twenty vessels of twenty-nine thousand 
four hundred and fifty-four tons, nine thousand three hundred and six 
horse-power, and one thousand six hundred and sixty-seven men. 
They make two trips a month between England and Aspinwall in 
twenty-two days, stopping at St. Thomas and Carthagena. Six 
branch lines go from St. Thomas to Nassau, Jamaica, Barbadoes, 
Tobago, Porto Rico, Havana, and Vera Cruz ; the whole 
converging at St. Thomas, the island which Mr. Seward wisely 
wished to buy, and which Congress would not. The same company 
sends a monthly steamer to Brazil by Lisbon, and it touches along 
the Atlantic coast. A third British line, the Pacific Steam Naviga- 
tion Company, has the monopoly of mails and passengers along the 
Pacific coast of South America from Panama to Valparaiso. A 



EUROPEAN AMERICA. 649 

fourth line* leaves Liverpool every fifteen days for Northern Brazil, 
A fifth British line leaves London and Antwerp for the ports of Brazil. 
A sixth leaves Panama foi> New Zealand, making the longest 
unbroken steamship passage in the world, six thousand six hundred 
miles. The Cunard line, with twent} T -two vessels, is heavily subsi- 
dized to New York. The Montreal ocean line, subsidized by Canada, 
owns eighteen steamships. The Inman line with seventeen steamers, 
the Williams and Guion, the Anchor, the London, and the National 
lines send together at least a steamer a day to New York, so that 
there is probably in the American trade one hundred British steam- 
ships. The Spanish run a semi-monthly line between Havana and 
Porto Rico and Cadiz. The Germans run eleven steamers from 
Hamburg to New York, and a line from Hamburg to New Orleans, 
and a line of nineteen steamers from Bremen to New York, Balti- 
more, and New Orleans. The French despatch a heavily subsidized 
weekly line from Havre to New York and a monthly line from Bor- 
deaux to Brazil and Buenes Ayres. The aggregate of all these 
vessels is probably not below one hundred and fifty, of two hundred 
thousand tons" capacity, and manned by twelve thousand men. 

To this large mercantile steam navy of Europe, employed in the 
waters of the American continent, we oppose only three steamers 
which sail to St. Thomas and the ports of Brazil, three which run 
to Havana, three steamboats to St. John, New Brunswick, and the 
Pacific Mail Steamship line to Yokohama and Hong Kong. Three or 
four slow, irregular, and aged steamers to Liverpool, Bremen, or 
Antwerp, keep up the infrequent apparition of our flag on the 
Atlantic. The rest is our coastwise commerce, from which foreign 
bottoms are excluded. There are causes and explanations of this 
maritime poverty, but no American can forget that he was formerly 
a citizen of the second commercial power in the world, and no repub- 
lican will forget that on this continent, particular^, every American 
flag in sight at a masthead is an encouragement to the self-governing. 

In the old Spanish da}^s Chili communicated with Spain once a 
year. In 1840 a Mr. Wheelwright, of Rhode Island, began steam 
navigation on the Pacific with two small English-built steamers, the 
" Peru " and the " Chili ; " out of this experiment has come the 
Pacific Steam Navigation Company, before mentioned, and now 
entirely English, which connects every port between Patagonia and 
Panama. The Chilian subsidy to this line is nearly sixty thousand 
dollars a year ; during the numerous revolutions and wars along the 
82 



650 THE NEW WOULD COMPABED WITH THE OLD. 

coast, these steamers make immense sums by transporting troops and 
munitions of war. The fares on the line are among the highest in the 
world, costing from Panama to Valparaiso two hundred and thirty 
dollars in the cabin, sixty dollars in the steerage, and for freight 
eighteen dollars per ton, and so large are the dividends that they 
are announced secretly. The fare from Panama to Lima is one hun- 
dred and thirty-five dollars v and cabin to Guyaquil seventy-five 
dollars. Complaint is made of the food and the rate of fare by the 
people on the line, and competition by an American line has long 
been hoped for. A small native Chilian line began in 1851 to run to 
ports south of Valparaiso, and, with a capital of seventy-four thousand 
dollars, it cleared forty thousand dollars in two years. The Chilian 
government offered, in 1853, a subvention of sixty thousand dollars a 
year for a French line which should make eight yearly voyages be- 
tween Valparaiso and Liverpool around Magellan ; and in 1865 the 
Chilian Congress offered one hundred thousand dollars yearly. So 
much have our interests on the Pacific declined, that, in 1863, to 
thirtynsix thousand nine hundred and three letters carried by the Pacific 
Steam Navigation Company on account of Europe, two thousand 
seven hundred and sixty-nine only were credited to the United States. 
" Thus England, France, and Germany," sa}^s Don Ramon Paez, in 
1868, " have secured the monopoly of the South American trade, with 
total exclusion of this country, which has to pay cash for what the 
former obtain in exchange for the produce of their manufactories. All 
these nations, moreover, appoint permanent representatives, chosen 
from among their ablest diplomats, and keep them there as long as 
they choose to remain, while America has sent few, as yet, but broken- 
down and quarrelsome politicians. " 

Amongst her export friends, England rated, in 1868, Germany as 
the first, British India as the second, United States third, Brazil tenth, 
Canada twelfth, New Granada fifteenth, Cuba and Porto Rico seven- 
teenth, British West Indies nineteenth, Argentine Republic twentieth, 
Chili twenty-third, Peru twenty-seventh, Mexico thirty-first, and 
Uruguay thirty-third. In the same year the British rated amongst 
the nations from whom they took imports, the United States first, 
France second, Germany third, Brazil tenth, British West Indies four- 
teenth, Chili seventeenth, Peru eighteenth, Cuba and Porto Rico 
twentieth, British Guiana twenty-fifth, British North America twenty- 
sixth, New Granada thirty-first. % By that time France had become 
the second mercantile marine power on the seas, superseding the 



EUKOPEAN AMERICA. 651 

United States ; she had of steamers four hundred and seven, of one 
hundred and thirty thousand tonnage ; England two thousand nine 
hundred and thirty-one, of nine hundred thousand tonnage ; France 
had fifteen thousand six hundred and thirty-seven sailing vessels, and 
England twenty-eight thousand seven hundred and seventy-three. 
Beside these figures we may well be amazed at our place in the 
waters of America. 

The American ship is America's only foreign possession. Wher- 
ever it appears, it is a colony, an apostle, an invitation, an ambassa- 
dor. It was an American ship that reinforced Garibaldi at Messina, 
that destroyed Miramon at Sacrificios, that carried the last Bourbon 
from France, and that covered Kossuth with its flag. We shall cease 
to regret the rebellion only when that familiar, hull is frequent again, 
and when in every port to which we go our colors shall appear among 
the masts. 

The political anarchy of Spanish America is apparently as incur- 
able as its social components are incapable of union. The Spanish 
American, as we comprehend him, is not worthy of absorption into a 
country whose institutions have been vindicated by its people. But 
Spanish America is endeared to us by cousinly geographies, by the 
sympathy we hold with every rod of both Americas, and by the belief 
we have that to this tenacious sympathy an according destiny must 
come. This belief is implanted in every American boy ; it continues 
equal and undaunted amidst the scepticisms of old age ; it is chas- 
tened, perhaps, but not forgotten, after wasting war. With the mul- 
titude it is mainly a material ambition ; with practical statesmen, a 
consideration of mankind's opportunities postponed by our inaction ; 
in minds of rarer nature, it is a waiting yet an ardent faith. While 
it is a national faith, it is also a republican faith, steadily ignoring 
the possibility that either Canada, or Cuba, or Brazil can continue sub- 
ject or independent monarchies. Not that the democratic spirit can suf- 
fer from the contiguity of such examples, but that the democratic spirit 
will not rest while it may influence. And perhaps the American 
desire for universal dominion on this continent is only a ruder form 
of the democratic spirit, — the missionary ship which bears our prin- 
ciples. 

Canada and Brazil are equal failures as governments, — safer but 
duller realms than Mexico, — disappointing the immigrant with their 
political atmosphere, and mocking his dreams. But the United 
States' spirit always discriminates between the achievements and the 



652 THE NEW WORLD COMPARED WITH THE OLD. 

capacities of our neighbors, between a torpid present and a future 
which may be made galvanic by our contact. The American spirit 
leaps up at every project of colonization or commerce in the for- 
eign dominions of this continent ; in our practical homesteads the 
infrequent imagination becomes almost the poet's, at the mention of 
some impending " annexation ; " but all these ardent aspirations 
cluster about The Ship ! 

The ship is the American spirit abroad. The flag which arouses 
it never waves so handsomely as at the masthead. With shipping 
we can put the republic at the piers of every city on the New Conti- 
nent, and make paramount again our waning prestige at Valparaiso, 
Callao, Rio, and on the La Plata. Our warlike marine does not carry 
our institutions ; its sailors are neither colonists nor traders ; they do 
not, like our merchant sailors, sow principles in their enterprises and 
plant them together. 

Railroads across the continent are triumphs of perseverance ; canals 
ensure union no less than wealth ; but the interior works of many 
aged and tottering nations are also wonderful, dragged to the light 
by some indomitable traveller, who tells of the extent of their fields 
of tea, their boundless harvests, and their vast methodized and 
frugal toil. Still, the reader will ask for their ships ; for, with wings, 
Holland is greater than China without them. 

This is the strong wish of the national heart, the cry of the new 
crusader, with " God wills it" upon his lips, as he sees the continent 
which he can regenerate falling to dulness, or to anarchy, or back 
to its illiberal origin. Restore our commerce on the sea. If 
our ship-yards cannot be repeopled, bring ships, meantime, from else- 
where, that the sailor's spirit may not die. At this time there are 
two hundred thousand American men bred by or upon the salt water, 
who are about to put by the tiller for the plough, there being no 
chance for them on their native element. They are of the mettle of 
Ward, of Rhode Island, who made the American climate better known 
in China than an} r Minister Plenipotentiary we ever sent there ; who 
could barely read, yet he led the armies, and espoused the sister of 
an Emperor. 

When our commerce shall revive by a return of wisdom and pat-' 
riotism to Congress, our interest in the kindred states of our con- 
tinent will also revive. We have had experience with Spanish 
America already ; we have met it, with many of its evils, in Califor- 
nia, Louisiana, and .Florida, and its hosts of anarchy have 



EUROPEAN AMERICA. 653 

vanished at our coming. As late as 1789 a Capuchin priest arrived 
at New Orleans, charged by King Charles IV., of Spain, to setup the 
Holy Inquisition in the province of Louisiana. We may imagine 
what would be the condition of the Mississippi Valley at this interval 
of only eighty years, when it has developed under toleration to be 
a greater empire than Spain, had that holy beneficence been per- 
mitted to naturalize itself amongst us. The priest was kidnapped by 
the Spanish governor, Miro, and sent home, with the apology "that 
the mere name Qf the Inquisition uttered in New Orleans would not 
only check immigration, but would drive away the people who have 
already come." 

In like manner we shall find the perversities sown by monarchy, 
military government, and a corrupt priesthood, to fly before us when 
we arrive, in the destiny of things, at Havana, at Comayagua, at 
Tehuantepec, or elsewhere. All philosophical foreign observers have 
remarked upon the power of the North American character to civilize 
and to organize new communities. Froebel, who was in California in 
1850, thus published this judgment in London : " The whole process 
of development through which the social life of California has passed 
in a few years is a striking and most instructive instance of the 
origin, organization, and improvement of human society, from motives 
of advantage and necessity ; while the result bears a strong testimony 
in favor of the political and social forms and usages of the North 
Americans, without which the Californian experiment could never 
have succeeded. No European nation would have had sufficient 
experience and skill in self-government to answer the wants of a 
situation such as that of Californian society in its nascent state." 

The American feeling is no less earnest, decided, and yet affection- 
ate, toward British, than toward Spanish America. 

We have come to the period when the grandchildren of British 
loyalists in Nova Scotia cry aloud for our star to arise ; when Brit- 
ish Columbia pines for the delay of our coming ; when Quebec lifts 
up her voice in open day to ask release from England, and Toronto 
murmurs " Amen." But we should be worth coming to without war- 
fare ; our invitation should have no less dignity than our sword. 
" Peace," says Senator Sumner, " is for us a universal conqueror. 
Through peace the whole world will be ours. Filled with the might 
of peace, the sympathy we extend to the struggling will be next to 
alliance." 



& 



INDEX. 



Aristocracy, English, fruits of, 35 ; shadow 
of, 63 ; its fear of America, 64 ; its origin 
65 ; derivation of the word, 66 ; the Eng- 
lish the wealthiest in Europe, 71; mean 
ing of the prefixes von and de on the con- 
* tinent, 71 ; sangre azul, 71 ; life of the 
British, 74 ; sources of its influence, 81 ; 
a relic of barbarism, 82 ; " Romances " of, 
107 ; servility of the people to, 159. 

Albert, Prince, courtship, 52 ; marriage, 55 
death, 59 ; monumental inscription over 
60. 

Amebic a, titles in, an English legacy, 62 
malevolence of the English aristocracy to 
ward, 64 ; life in, contrasted with English 
stagnation, 72; judicial system of, 215; 
treason in, 216 ; patent office, 220 ; public 
records of, burned by England, 221 ; navy 
department, pay of the clerks of, 223 
post-office, 227 ; postage collections in, 228 
franking system of, 228 ; civil service of. 
228 : reform of, 235 ; compensation of pub- 
lic officers in, 236 ; office hunting in, 240 : 
art in, 241 ; colleges of, 247 ; boat race at 
Qumsiganiond,259 ; Congressional library 
at Washington, 261 ; medical education in, 
262 ; administration of States of, 265 ; two 
great dangers to the government, 271 ; the 
State of New York cited as an example of 
a separate sovereignty, 272 ; comment of 
De Tocqueville on government of, 281 ; 
comparison of American cities with British, 
284 : the cotton gin, 297 ; sewing machine, 
297; manufactures of, 300 ; nationality of, 
an amalgam of different races, 313 ; ten- 
dency of the government toward centraliz- 
ation, 315 ; aErench writer's sketch of life 
in, 315 : consequences of the revolt of, from 
England, 321 ; control of Indian tribes by 
the government, 330 ; interview of the au- 
thor with Mr. Taylor, the retiring Indian 
commissioner, on Indian affairs, 331 ; 
" manifest destiny " of, 338 ; fortifications 
in, 354 : the fighting material of, 360 ; 
cause of the decline of American shipping, 
368 i " who sees an American ship V 368 ; 
probable result of a war between, and Eng- 
land, 3/2; De Tocqueville on the impreg- 
nable position of, 373 ; finances of, 377 ; 
offences against the State in, 336 ; native 
and foreign tonnage in I860. 390 ; the coin- 
age of, 390 ; De Tocqueville quoted on the 
civil service of, 392 ; the cotton crop of, 
393 : the agitation of the free trade or pro- 
tection policy, 393; sympathy of, with 
France, 403 ; political traditions in, of no 
account, 406 ; the trades union system in, 
411 ; the Irish element in, 413 ; beginning 
of the anti-slavery movement in, 416 ; not 
responsible for English shortcomings, 429 ; 



progress of, retarded by English " endow- 
ments," 429 ; freedom of institutions of, an 
attraction to the world, 431 ; De Tocque- 
ville's eulogium on the founders of, 433 ; 
the highest offices in, accessible to all, 437 ; 
party spirit in , seldom bitter, 430 ; scientific 
operations of English burglars in, 441 ; 
John Quincy Adams and William H. Sew- 
ard tested by an American standard, 446 ; 
exclusion of the ablest men from the presi- 
dency , 447 ; House of Representatives, 448 ; 
Senate, 448 ; apathy of citizens in their * 
civic duties, 449 ; national manners in, 450 ; 
Webster and Byron, 453 ; two attempts of 
England to crush by force, 454 ; batteries 
of English detraction of, 454 ; motive of 
England's policy in the late civil war, 454 ; 
English congratulations understood in, 
454 ; the index of British dislike of, 455 ; 
"reciprocity," 455; "America and her 
commentators," by Henry T. Tuckerman, 
456 ; a chorus of English defamation, 456 ; 
worth of English criticism of, 458 ; looking 
toward the orient, 462 ; immigration to, 
463 : English misgivings of, 463: Talleyrand 
quoted on the treatment of, by Europe, 
583; geographical parallel with Europe, 
589 ; advancement of interests of, in the 
East, 608 ; influence of, in American 
waters, 618. 

Arnold, Benedict, 63. 

Anti-Corn Law League, 65. 

Alabama, cruise of, 64. 

Authors and Novelists, rush of, from Eng- 
land to America, 64. 

D'Arblay, Madame, description of the Eng- 
lish aristocracy during Ihe American rev- 
olution, 69 

Alfred, King, 66. 

Aristotle, 66. 

Astor, John Jacob, 72. 

Architecture, Greek, akin to Greek free- 
dom, 91. 

Almanac British, the, on the defective con- 
struction of the houses" of parliament, 118. 

Adams, John Quincy, 133. 

Armada, Spanish, the, 201. 

: ' Army and Navy," the feeling in America 
regarding, inherited from England, 344 ; 
American and British armies described, 
345; pay of American superior officers, 
347 : of British officers, 349 : purchase of 
their commissions by the latter, 350 : Wax- 
all, an army critic, on the organization of, 
351 ; military hierarchy of the English ar- 
my, 351 ; West Point, 351 : America n 
school fleet, 352 : Gen. Garfield on the effi 
ciency of West Point, 352 : flogging in the 
British annv, 358; the right of search, 
359 ; treatment of the soldier by the United 
States, 359; the American steam sloop 
Wampanoag, the fastest vessel afloat, 366 ; 
superiority of American naval construe- 

655 



656 



INDEX 



S tion, 367 ; nomenclature of the navy in 
England and America, 369. 

Annapolis, sketch of, 363 ; naval academy 
at, 364. 

Austria, a comparative list of popular rep- 
resentatives in the government of, 534 ; 
government and fortunes of, 591 ; com- 
mercial status of, 610. 

Australia, comparison of, with South Amer- 
ica, 632. 

Agassiz, Professor, on the character of the 
Paraguayan war, 645. 



Bank of England, capital of, 29. 
- Buckingham Palace, state dinner at, 56. 

"Brigadier Generals " in America, 63. 

" Best Families " in America, 63. 

Beales, 64. 

Bright, John, his opinion of English church 
and state, 65 ; opportunity of, 124 ; speech- 
es of, 144 ; his opinion of statesmen, 187 ; 
at the triumph of the reform bill, 420. 

Baronets, what they are, 66; how created, 69. 

Black Prince, the, the first Duke in Eng- 
land, 67. 

Bedford, Duke of, 68 ; estate of, 72 ; how 
acquired, 73. 

Baron, title of, 68. 

Barry, Sir Charles, architect of the British 
houses of parliament, 90. 

Borough, what it is, 122. 

Bancroft, Mr. George, on the death of Lin- 
coln, 143. 

Blue Book, American, 224. 

Bristed, Charles Astor, 247; comparison 
by, of English and American university 
education, 253. 

Britain, Great, principal cities of, com- 
pared with American , 284 ; railway system 
of, 306 ; table of foreign possessions of, 
318 ; and European, 319 ; colonies of, in 
Africa, 320 ; war of, on Abyssinia, 320 ; 
salaries of colonial governors, 321 ; Indian 
empire, 321 ; the Indian revolt, 324 ; in- 
vestments of, in Hindoostan, 325 ; invasion 
of, by Julius Caesar, 358 ; by William, the 
conqueror, 358 ; the marine of, 361 ; na- 
tional debt of, 375 ; proportion of popular 
representatives in the government as com- 
pared with other countries, 534. 

British Colonies, fate of, 339. 

Bryant, Wm. Cullen, a radical advocate of 
free trade, 394. 

Bentham, Jeremy, an advocate of French 
democracy, 408. 

Bumford, extracts from his work, " life of a 
radical," 415. 

Brooklyn, city of, 477. 

Buonaparte, Charles Louis Napoleon, empe- 
ror of France, history of, 496 ; Victor Hu- 
go on the inauguration of, 507. 

Brazil, table of popular representatives of,534 

Belgium, list of popular representatives of, 
534 ; income of the king of, 597. 

Blanc, Louis, in favor of admitting Louis 
Napoleon to the national assembly , 558. 



Bourbons, the- sketch of, 562. 

Berryer, M., The French advocate, 595. 

Baden, pay of the grand duke of, 506. 

Bavaria, income of the king of, and charac- 
ter of the army of, 595; the catholic 
church in, 595. 



Corporation of London, mode of receiving 
the queen, 45. 

Crown, Royal, of England, 51. 

Carlotta, empress of Mexico, 52. 

Calverts, the, 63. • 

Commons, House of, in England, the centre 
of power, 40 ; controlled by the aristocracy, 
63 ; composition of, 119 ; persons ineligible 
to, 120 ; mode of resigning a seat in, 120 ; 
what each member represents, 121 ; origin 
of, 123 ; history of, 123 ; manual of, 130 ; 
first beginnings of, 130 ; ceremonial ob- 
served in organizing, 131 ; articles in the 
press concerning, seldom answered by mem- 
bers, 133; lobbies, 133; powers of, 134 ; 
etiquette of, 137 ; description of a scene 
in, 138 ; manners of, sketched by Mr. Grant, 
a veteran reporter of, 140 ; attractions of, 
membership in, 147; power over Prime 
Ministers, 170 ; salaries of clerks in, 223. 

Carlyle, Thomas, a worshipper of aristocra- 
cy, 63. 

Cobbett, William, how he attacked the aris- 
tocracy, 64 ; the writings of, of great au- 
thority, 416, 

Cobden, Richard, 64 ; 65 ; 124. 

Cotton, an enemy to British aristocracy, 64. 

Church, Dissenting, the, a relentless enemy 
of the British aristocracy, 65 ; Oliver 
Cromwell sprung from, 65. 

Cromwell, Oliver, no recognition of his rule 
in English legal or historical documents, 
195 ; anecdote of, 303. 

" Cousin," the term as used between sover- 
eigns, 68. 

Chatham, Lord, bibulous propensities of, 
80. * 

Capitol at Washington, construction and 
cost of, 83 ; dome of, 84 ; surpassed only 
by Westminster, 85. 

Clarke, Mr., American architect, 84. 

" Charing Cross," London, 87. 

Chaucer, Geoffrey, 81. 

Chancellor, the Lord, English, power and 
patronage of, 95. 

Census, the American, 120; the English, 
215. 

Congress, the American, power of, 134; 
difference between, and parliament, 134 ; 
debates in, 134 ; committee duty in, 136. 

County, what it is, 121 ; in England and 
Wales ; in Trelnnrl : in Scotland, 121. 

Ctty, what it is, and free cities, what^ 122. 

Cinque Ports, tub, what they are, 122. 

Club Life in England, 126. 

Cabinets, the existence of such a body un- 
known to English or American law, 154; 
importance of the selection of, in England, 
156 ; the American constitution on, 156 ; 



INDEX 



657 



intrigues within, 157 ; -the English twice 
the size of the American, 159 ; incidents in 
the history of, 160 ; differences in Ameri- 
can, 171 ; corruption in the English, 182 ; 
debate on the proposition of Mr. Pendle- 
ton regarding the American , 183 ; mem- 
bers of, not ministerially responsible, 184 ; 
places of meeting of the British, 185 ; mem- 
bers of the American, during the impeach- 
ment of Andrew Johnson, 184. 

Chase, Secretary, resignation of, 171 ; bank- 
ing system of, 377. 

Canning, Mr. George, enmity towards, of 
Earl Grey, 174. 

Cox, S. S. , Hon. , humorous speech of, against 
right of members of the cabinet to seats 
in congress, 183. 

Castlereagh, Lord, suicide of, 185 ; resi- 
dence of, in India, 323. 

Canterbury, Archbishop of, 189 ; dignity 
of, 190 ; income of, 190 ; residence of, and 
state, 190 ; ceremony of the installation of 
a bishop by, 191. 

Church, the* Established, in England; sta- 
tistics of marriages in, 191 ; Episcopal 
church in America, an example of the wis- 
dom of separating church and state, 191; 
an English parish, 193 ; action of the dis- 
senters, 191 ; the lawsuit of Braintree. 
194 ; the Irish church and Mr. Gladstone. 
194 ; the champion of the Irish church a 
Jew — M. Disraeli, 195 ; intolerance of, in 
England, 198; the. Scotch church, 199; 
theology of the English church introduced 
under Edward VI., 200 ; extracts from the 
English liturgy , 201 ; regarded by the aris- 
tocracy as part of their domain, 203 ; po-- 
litical ballads of, 204 ; character of the 
churchmen, 204; patronage of, 206 ; Brit- 
ish curates, 206 ; the t; convocation," 206 : 
confessional in. 207 ; salaries of Eng- 
lish bishops, 209 ; the life of an English 
rector depicted in Mrs. Gaskill's " Char- 
lotte Bronte," 209 ; salaries of Irish bish- 
ops, 210 ; the Irish church establishment, 
210 ; the Presbyterians, 210 ; the Ritualis- 
tic party. 211-12; Bishop Colenso, 211 ; 
breach between the Protestant and Roman 
Catholic churches, 211 ; Dr. Pusey, 212. 

Cathedral, English, 307 ; Canterbury and 
York, 208. 

Ciianmer, Archbishop, 201. 

Church, the Roman Catholic, in Ireland, 
210 ; Maynootii, 210 ; in the United States, 
211. 

Church, the Methodist Episcopal in Amer- 
ica, 212. 

Church and State in America, 212. 

Customs, the United States, 214; number 
of officers in, and in the internal revenue, 
and their pay . 215 ; and connected with 
the land office, and their pay ; and in 
other departments, including the post- 
office, 215. 

Coleridge, Samuel, anecdote of, 226. 

Crimean War, effect of in England, 229. 

Clay, Henry, on rotation in office, 234 ; an 
advocate of a high tariff, 394. 



Channel Islands, the, 276. 

Clyde, the, ship building on, 303. 

Cornwallis, Lord, sketch of, by ML:Mar- 
tineau, 322. 

" Caste" in India, 326. 

Chatham, burning of, by a Dutch fleet, 354. 

Caesar, Julius, armament of, in the inva- 
sion of Britain, 358 ; the invasion of Gaul 
by, 485. 

Crimea, England and France in, 370 ; Cooke, 
Jay, 377. 

Coast Survey, the bureau of, 386. 

Chartist Party, the, of England, 403. 

Cooke, quoted on passage of English reform 
bill, 418. 

Chambers, Robert, on extension of British 
suffrage, 430. 

Canadas, confederation of, 457; number of 
representatives of, 534. 

Chambord, De Count, head of the legitimist 
party in France, 563. 

Cooper, Fennimore, conversation with Louis 
Napoleon, 502. 

Cassagnac, Granier de, 513 

Chili, comparative number of popular rep- 
resentatives in the government of, 534. 

Clergy, the French, composition and char- 
acter of, 563. 

Communism and Socialism, French, 569. 

Comte, Auguste, sketch of, 572. 

Chicago, trade of, 613. 

Costa Rica, 649. 



Disraeli, Hon. Benjamin, thrift of, 64; 
a " Right Honorable," 65 ; address on the 
death of Lincoln, 142 ; sketch of, 146 ; his 
opinion of statesmen, 187 ; champion of 
the established church, 195. 

" Duke " and " Count," what these titles sig- 
nify, 67. 

Derby, Earl of, estate of, 72 ; sketch of, 145. 

Devonshire, Duke of, furnishes an exempli- 
fication of the British aristocracy, 74. 

Dublin, Lord Mayor of, 133 ; city of, 292. 

Dissenters, the, effort for the repeal of the- 
test and corporation acts, 197 ; sepulchre 
of, at Bunhill Fields in England. 

Departments, Public, English and Ameri- 
can, salaries in ; hours of work, and holi- 
days in, 223. 

Delaware, State of, whipping-post in, 267. 

De Tocquevllle, on the tendency of modern 
government, 326 ; on the decline of French 
influence in America , 338 ; impregnability 
of the United States, 373; on the signifi- 
cance of American parties, 400 ; on the of- 
fice of president in America, 447; on the 
relative composition of the House of Repre- 
sentatives and the Senate in America, 448 ; 
on Americans abroad, 400 ; on the absence 
of gratuitous functionaries in America, 520; 
on the salaries of officers in France and. the 
Unired States, 538 ; compares the French 
with American journalists, 566 ; on Ameri- 
can oratory, 569 ; sketch of, 578. 



658 



INDEX 



Dunderberg, an American ironclad, 370. 

Dickens, Charles, on the old United States 
bank, 381 ; a tool of the English aristocra- 
cy, 431 ; disparagement of America by, 
455 ; curious illustration of the venality 
of, 459. 

Dilke, Charles W., Mr. , quotations from, 
on American protectionists , 396-397 ; quo- 
tations from, America and England not 
of the same blood, 460 ; a mouthpiece of 
English jealousy, 622: quotation from, on 
the future of the Pacific, 630. 

Drummond Light, the, how originated, 388 ; 

Denmark, number of popular representatives 
in government of, 535 ; cost of its king, 
597 ; West India Islands of, 638. 

Drouin de L'Huys, sketch of, 560. 

Dix, General, a specimen of American diplo- 
mats abroad, 568. 

De Lacroix, Eugene, works of, cause of an 
emeute in Paris, 57o. 

Elizabeth, Queen, of England, 67. 

Earl, title of, in England, 68. 

Emigration, causes of, in Great Britain, 81. 

Emancipation, Act of, American, 178. 

England, the passage of the reform bill a 
crisis in the affairs of, 181 ; nature of the 
government of, 182 ; judicial system of, 
215-16 ; treason in, 216 ; Sir Edward Coke's 
style of browbeating at the trial of Sir Wal- 
ter Raleigh, 217 ; and at the trial of Essex, 

217 ; Jeffreys, 217 ; salaries of judicial of- 
ficers in, 217 ; imprisonment for debt in, 

218 ; George Francis Train in, 218 ; home 
secretary of, has charge of the police of, 

219 ; and of several public bureaux in, 
219-20 ; patent office of, 221 ; public rec- 
ord office of, 221 ; the agricultural inter- 
est in, 222 ; admiralty office in, 223; sala- 
ries of clerks in public offices, 223 ; inland 
revenue of, 223; British museum, 223; 
state paper office of, 224 ; stationery office, 
and treasury office, 224 ; board of trade 
and plantations, 224 ; post-office, 226 ; let- 
ters inviolate in, 227 ; reform of the civil 
service in, 229 ; government situations in, 
230 ; commissioners of civil service , 230 ; 
public education in, and in America, 241 ; 
educational statistics of the British army, 
244 ; national schools of, 245 ; universi- 
ties, 249 ; colleges, 250 ; morale of English 
university life, 257 ; boat racing, 258 ; law 
schools in, 263 ; Albert memorial in Hyde 
Park, 264 ; counties in, compared with 
American States, 265 ; English magistrates, 
269; game laws in, 269 ; justices of the 
peace in, 271 ; Lord Coke's opinion of that 
office, 271 ; municipal counties of, 272 ; 
coal-fields of, 301 ; municipal reform in, 
314 ; Miss Martineau on local self-govern- 
ment in, 314 ; intemperance in diet, a na- 
tional defect, 316 ; rule of, in Hindoostan, 
328 ; settlement of Australia by, 336 ; mili- 
tary schools of, 352 ; treasure expended 
by, on fortifications, 353 ; straits of navy 



of, since the abandonment of impressment, 
365 ; navy of, in the Crimean war, 365 ; 
right of search claimed by, 366 ; royal 
yacht club of, 369 ; nomenclature of na- 
vy, 369 ; budget of, 379 ; permanent debt 
of, 391 ; and revenue, 391 ; interest on the 
national debt, 392; "Young England," 
405 ; the radical party in, 405 ; party dog- 
gedness in, 407 ; the temperance question 
in, 408 ; the cry of "no popery "in, 409 ; 
woman suffrage in, 409 ; the trades union 
in, 411 ; Harriet Martineau on the work- 
ing of the, 411 ; political elections in, 414 ; 
attendance of the author at anti-slavery 
meetings in, during the American war, 
421 ; sketch of an English election scene 
in, from Thackeray, 421 ; attrition of 
America on , 430 ; blight of the aristocracy 
on the industrial classes of, 431 ; institu- 
tions of, in an American crucible, 432 ; na- 
tional cruelty, 433 ; profligacies in high life, 
436 ; episode in the rule of the Prince Re- 
gent, 436 ; " primogeniture "in, 439 ; the 
prevalence of crime in, 439 ; the chevalier 
d> Industrie anglais known in Paris, 441 ; 
the English idea of loyalty a substantial 
embodiment, while the American is an ab- 
straction, 442 ; a London scene from a lo- 
cal journal, 443 ; criminal statistics, by a 
member of parliament, 443 ; Bacon and 
Gladstone instanced as representative men, 
444 ; Cobden and Bright also adduced as 
illustrations of another side, 445 ; stormy 
look-out for England, 451 ; no sympathy 
due to her from America, 454 ; systematic 
malignity of, to America, 455 ; hypocriti- 
cal pretensions of friendship understood 
in America, 456 ; origin of war of, with 
Russia, 517 ; geographical comparison of, 
with America, 589 ; bound over to keep 
the peace, 621. 

Europe, public libraries of, 262 ; guide book 
of, 305 ; three great subdivisions of races 
of, 607. 

Edinburgh, City of, its influence in English 
politics, 292 ; historical associations of, 
301. 

Enfield, English musket and rifle factory, 
370. 

Eugenie, the French empress, 499 ; roman- 
tic response of, 517 ; scene in the French 
cabinet, 561. 

Exports and imports of some of the great 
powers in 1867, 599. 

Eastern Question, the, 618. 

Egypt, present status of, 620. 

East, the struggle for the possession of, 623. 



IF 1 

Fonthill Abbey, 74. 

Fox, Charles James, his manner of life, 79. 

Franklin, Benjamin, 81 ; alleged to have 
been the founder of the American post- 
office, 227. 

Fawkes, Guido, 92. 

Ferrers, Earl of, a noble executed, 110. 



INDEX. 



659 



Franchise, the extension of, 124 ; provisions 
of, 125, abuses of, 125. 

Flag, The American, 150. 

Fessenden, Hon. Wm. P., 172. 

Free Trade, or a High Tariff, one of the 
great questions in America, 393 ; the ef- 
fect of free trade in England, 395 ; Mr. 
Charles W. Dilke on the question of, 397 ; 
the author of England's greatness on the 
same subject, 397 ; the convention at Phil- 
adelphia, 410 ; the democratic party sail- 
ing toward free trade, 410 ; argument to 
the Irish element that a high tariff will 
cripple England, 410. 

France, the French revolution, 401 ; the im- 
perial succession of, 517 ; compared with 
the United States, 528 ; De Tocqueville on 

• the same subject, 531 ; proportion of pop- 
ular representatives in the government to 
the whole population as compared with 
the ratio in other countries, 534 ; popular 
education in, 539 ; charities of, 540 ; state 
of religion in, 541; railways, omnibuses, 
post-offices, and telegraphs, money order 
system of, 543 ; weights and measures of, 
544 ; factories of, 544 ; credit fonder, 545 ; 
credit mobilier, 545 ; pawnbroking shops 
of, 546 ; conscription in, 547 ; judicial sys- 
tem of, 547 ; imprisonment in, for crime, 
549; scenes in police courts ,550; the concier- 
gierie, 551 ; De Tocqueville quoted on the 
civil administration of, 552 ; the warlike 
movements of France of world-wide signifi- 
cance, 555 ; free trade party of, 579; cost of 
the wars to, initiated by the present ruler 
of, 600. 

Fisk, James, " admiral," effect of develop- 
ments of, 530. 

Fleury, Major, career of, 559. 

Favre, Jules, sketch of, 568. 

Fourier, sketch of, 571. 

O 

George III., of England, the grandfather of 
Victoria, 40 ; speech of, to the first Ameri- 
can minister, 312. 

Guizot, description by, of an English state 
dinner, 57 ; an advocate of christian unity 
against modern rationalism, 212 ; his opin- 
ion of Persigny, 558 ; sketch of, 565. 

" Gentleman," different meanings of the 
word in England and America, 93. 

Grafton, Duke of, his pension, 70. 

Girard, Stephen, fortune of, 72 ; remark- 
able will of, 572. 

Gordon Castle, N. P. Willis' visit to, 77. 

Gibbon, the historian, 80. 

Globe, the, 134. 

Grant, Mr. James, a veteran English re- 
porter, quotations from, 99 ; 145- . 

Grant, General, as a " king " in a remodel- 
ed government, after the style in England, 
151 ; the inauguration of, 162. 

Grey, Earl, retirement of, 173. 

Garfield, Gen., of Ohio, quotations from 
his speech on the bill to give members of 
the American cabinet seats in Congress, 183. 



Gladstone, William E., a champion of the 
established church in England, 208 ; a be- 
liever in the union of church and state, 
202; advocate of administrative reform, 
229 ; an advocate of small momination 
boroughs, 270. 

Glasgow, City of7 the commercial metropo- 
lis of Scotland, 301. 

Girardin, Emile De, quotations from, - on 
American progress , 462 ; sketch of, 565. 

George IV, prince regent of England, recep- 
tion by, 499. 

Galignani's Messenger, origin of, 567. 

Garibaldi, sketch of, 576. 

Germany, the unity of races of, a question 
disturbing Europe, 581 ; rulers of German 
principalities, and their income, 595 ; sum- 
mary of politics of, Note, 608. 

Greece, Pan-Hellenism, one of the questions 
agitating Europe, 583 ; salary of the king 
of, 595 ; watermen of 611. 

Governments of Leading Powers, compara- 
tive cost of, per capita on their subjects ,599. 

Guatamala, state of, 639. 

Guyana, state of, 641. 

Hugo, Victor, reference to, in connection 
with his description of the sewers of Paris, 
33 ; his work, " The Toilers of the Sea," 
contains a good description of Guernsey, 
276 ; quotation from , on the inauguration 
of Louis Napoleon, 507 ; at the barricades, 
513 ; description of a scene at, 514. 

Hughes, Thomas, his manner of attacking 
the aristocracy, 64 ; a reference to his 
works, 247. 

Hastings, battle of, 64; its consequences, 65. 

Hewitt, William, 77. 

Hastings, Marquis of, an exemplar of Brit- 
ish aristocracy, 80. 

Hamilton, Duke of, a specimen of English 
aristocracv 80. 

Hastings, Warren, impeachment of, 111; 
end of his career, 322. 

Hill, Rowland, improvement in the postal 
system effected by, 227. 

Hind o stan, " caste "in, 326. 

Halpine, Charles G., how he rhymed him- 
self into office, 412. 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, quotations from, 
on the idiosyncracies of English char- 
acter, 433 ; description by, of an English 
lord mayor's banquet, 435 ; quotation 
from, on English loyalty, 442 ; on the at- 
traction and repulsion of England and 
America, 460. 

Hudson River, the, 471. 

Hudson, Henry, his discoveries in America, 
273. 

Hortense, mother of Louis Napoleon, 501 ; 
at the graves of the Bourbons, 523. 

Holland , comparative list of popular repre- 
sentatives in the government of, 535; proba- 
ble subordination of, to German uuity , 608. 

Hanover, king of, income of, 598 ; a nest- 
egg, 598. 



660 



INDEX 



Havana, city of, 634. 
Honduras, state of, 640. 



Intelligencer, National, formerly an influ- 
ential organ at Washington, 135. 

Inauguration of Jefferson, 162 : of Tay- 
lor ; of Lincoln, 162 ; of Grant, 163. 

Impeachment, cases of, 185. 

Ireland , government of, 277 ; compared with 
Scotland, 285 ; national character of the. 
people, 278 ; O'Connell, 279 ; Miss Marti- 
neau, reference to some of the public men 
of, 280 ; " the^knight cf Gwynne," by Le- 
ver, a good picture of Irish society as for- 
merly constituted, 280 ; coast of, 308 ; chief 
cities of, 309 ; scenery and characteristics 
of, 312. 

Italy, a comparative list of popular repre- 
sentatives of, in the government of, 534 ; 
one of the most restless states of Europe, 
575; the unity of, impossible without 
Rome, 582 ; government of, 594 ; its ma- 
rine capacity, 611. 

International Analogies , Europe and Amer- 
ica, 606. 

Indies, West, the, 635. 



Johnson, Sir John, an example of the at- 
tractions of English aristocracy, 63. 

Johnson, Dr., a notetaker in the English 
house of commons, 134. 

Jackson, Andrew, President, scene in the 
cabinet of, 167 ; sympathy for Mrs. Eaton, 
174 ; dissolution of his cabinet, 175 ; sketch 
of his manner in office, 187 ; prescriptive 
policy of, 233. 

Jefferson, Thomas, firmness of, 184. 

James I., a Scotchman, and a pedant, 200. 

Josephine, last days of, 522. 

Kent, Duke of, the father of queen Victoria, 

poverty of, 40. 
Kent, Duchess of, an income procured for, 

by her daughter Victoria, 45. 
Kingsley, Charles, sycophancy of, 64 ; his 

opinion of the aristocracy, 65. 
Knighthood, orders of, 81. 
Kent, chancellor, on the appointment of 

judges by the executive, 448. 
Kinglake, sketches of Louis Napoleon by, 

506 ; 509. 



London, city of, the interest of the city 
for Americans, 24 ; general description of, 
26; the "season" in, 34; literature of, 
34 ; no such metropolis probable in Amer- 
ica, 35 ; tower of, 47 ; government build- 
ings in, 213 ; police of, 219 ; public bu- 
reaux under charge of the home secretary, 
219; customs of, 220; London Gazette, 



the organ of state intelligence, 824 ; sooty 
appearance of the public buildings, 239 ; 
Burlington house, 240 ; Somerset house, 
240; St. Bartholomew's hospital, 263; 
district courts in, 271 ; royal exchange of, 
385 ; notable case of bulling and bearing, 
385 ; the financial centre of the world, 386 ; 
as compared with New York, 470. 

Lincoln, Abraham, father of, 41 ; on Mr. 
Chase's administration of the treasury de- 
partment, 172 ; his account of the act of 
emancipation, 176. 

Leopold, of Belgium, his part in bringing 
about the marriage of the queen of Eng- 
land, 52. 

Luther, Martin, 60. 

Land, number of proprietors of, in England, 
72 ; in Ireland and Scotland, 72 ; the ene- 
my of the people in England, their friend 
in America, 72. 

Laws of entail and primogeniture in Eng- 
land, 72. 

Long worth, of Cincinnati, large estate of, 72. 

Lawsuit between Talbot and Berkeley, 74. 

Lyndhurst, Lord, an American tory, 81. 

Ladies, the presence of, in parliament, 100. 

London, Bishop of, 190. 

Land Office in America, number of officers 
in. and their compensation, 215. 

Layard, Mr., connection of, with administra- 
tive reform in England, 229. 

Lowell, the American Manchester, 296. 

Liberia, the only American colony, 337. 

Lighthouse Bureau, the, 386. 

Longfellow, Henry, quotation from the 
" Golden Legend " of, 456. 

Long Island, 472 ; the Sound, 472. 

Lafayette, General, an account of a visit 
paid to him in France by Hon. William H. 
Seward during a European tour, 584. 

IMC 

Moore, Thomas, the Irish bard, satirizes 
Washington, 24. 

Mary, Queen of Scots, 40. 

Manchester, city of, in England, the growth 
of the American staple, cotton, 65 ; its in- 
fluence during the American civil war, 292 ; 
the spinning jenny, 295 ; tory tactics in, 
during the French revolution, 402 ; mas- 
sacre of the people in, 404 . 

Maine, State of, how the name is derived, 67. 

Marquess, the title of, 68. 

Marlborough, Duke of, his estate, 76. 

Mackenzie, Dr. Shelton, 144. 

Monarchy, English, doomed, 149. 

Martineau, Miss Harriet, quoted from, 157, 
173, 378, and 440. 

Maynooth, hopes of, a failure, 210. 

Mauritius, or Isle de France, 338. 

McClellan, Captain George B., on the con- 
duct of the English forces during the Cri- 
mean war, 371. 

Money, uses of, 374. 

Mint, the English, 384. 

Mayhew Brothers, the, account by, of Eng- 
lish crime, 441. 



INDEX 



GG1 



Murat, 504. 

Morny, duc de, origin of, and usefulness to 

the French emperor, 567. 
Malmaison, 521. 
Maupas, de, sketch of, 559. 
Montalembert on public office hunting, 240 ; 

sketch of, 503. 
Mazzini, Guiseppe, sketch of, 576. 
Mexico, 639. 

3ST 

Nelson, highest motive of, 64 ; character and 
death of, 356. 

New England, Manchester cotton, and 
Presbyterianism, three great enemies of 
aristocracy , 65 ; the temperance movement 
in New England, 408. 

Norman Barons, how they acquired their 
local names, 66. 

New York, derivation of the name, 67 ; city 
of, how composed nationally, 121 ; popu- 
lation of the state of, 275 ; stock exchange, 
386 ; canals of, 390 ; as compared with 
London, 470 ; island of, 471 ; verses on, by 
the author, 472 ; drawbacks of a residence 
in, 483 ; A. T. Stewart's residences in, for 
the poor, 484. 

Noblemen, English, estates of, 72. 

Nobility and gentry, crimes of the, 80. 

National Era, formerly published at Wash- 
ington, 135. 

North, Lord, character of his administra- 
tion, 182. 

Native American, or know-nothing party ,409 

Napoleon, Jerome, 504. 

New Jersey, State of, 473. 

North German Confederation, number of 
popular representatives in the government 
of, as compared with other states, 531 ; 
how composed, 591. 

Napoleomdes, all authors, 561. 

Netherlands, king of, his income, 593 ; 
status of, 593. 

National Debts of the several great powers, 
598 ; and annual interest on, 599. 

New Granada, 640. 

O 

" Old Parr," 46. 
O' Conn ell, Daniel, 131. 
Oratory, American and European, char- 
acter of, 141. 
Orleanists, the, 562. 
Oneida Community, the, sketoh of, 572. 

IE 3 

Peers, origin of, 66 ; Irish and Scotch, 120 ; 
trial of one in the house of lords, 108. 

Paris, sewers of , 33 ; compared with Wash- 
ington, 470 ; early history, 486 ; influence, 
490 ; what was said of the old Gauis, said to 
be applicable to the modern Parisians, 495 ; 
fortifications of, and guard, 543 ; taxes of, 
544 ; administration of, 549 ; American 
population of, 567. 



Parliament Houses, British, cost of, 34 ; in 
Melbourne, 85 ; Ottawa, 86 ; description 
of the English, 89 ; officers of, 96 ; ceremo- 
nies of, 97. 
Parliament, English, the, prorogation or dis- 
solution of, 44 ; forms of proceedings in, 
111; how often reorganized, 121 ; county 
members of, how elected, 122 : character of, 
up to the year 1830, 123 ; directory of. 126 ; 
must be opened by the queen, 131 ; man- 
ner of business in, 132 ; etiquette of, 133 ; 
difference between, and congress, 134 ; has 
no printing office like that at Washington, 
135 ; committee duty of, compulsory, 136 ; 
" the mace/' 136 ; want of representative 
character, 149 ; dissolution of, 180 ; bribe- 
ry in, 182 ; abolition of the slave trade 
by, 186; admission to, of the Jews, ex- 
ceptional, 195 ; Committee of ways and 
means, and of supplies, importance of, 380. 

Peel, Sir Robert, defeat of, 65 ; policy of, 
as prime minister, 81 ; sketch of, 147 ; in- 
auguration of , 156-8-9 ; public acts of, 410. 

Protestantism, headquarters of, in London, 
35 ; breach between, and Roman Catholi- 
cism, 211 ; and rationalism, 'zll ; Guizots 
opinion of the ecumenical council , 212 ; 
Reinhold Baumstark on the same, 212. 

Palmerston, Lord, sketched by Bancroft, 
143 ; heartlessness of his character, 145. 

Prime Minister and President, similarity 
between the offices of, 151 ; 157 ; 173 ; 186. 

Pitt, William, Right Hon., questionableness 
of his policy, 186. 

Protection, meaning of, in England, 80. 

President, the American, contrasted with 
the English sovereign , 150 : room of, in the 
capitol, 98 ; mode of election of, 154 ; chief 
clerks of, 155 ; his cabinet meetings, 155 ; 
material features of this office and that 
of prime minister in England contrasted, 
162 ; cases of assassination of, and attempts 
at, 184-5. 

Parton, Mr., biographer, views of, on the 
purchase of Alaska, 336. 

Privy Council, the English, its relation to 
the cabinet, 175 ; what it is, and what it 
does, 176. 

Presbyterianism in Ireland, 210. 

Postmasters, number and compensation of, 
in the United States, 215. 

Peabody, Mr. George, beneficence of, 243. 

Pittsburgh, city of, a great American work- 
shop, 294. 

Portsmouth, the greatest naval station in 
England, 355. 

Pacific Railroad, the, 389. 

Political Parties, history of, in England 
and America, 399 ; De Tocqueville on 
American parties, 400. 

Prince of Wales, scene at baptism of, 434. 

Paris, Count de, 501. 

Patterson, Madame, eccentricities of, 505. 

Pr;:ss, the English, spirit of, 507. 

Phillippb, Louis, 507. 

Prussia, comparative list of popular repre- 
sentatives of, in the government of, 534 ; 
government and status of, 592. 



V 



662 



INDEX, 



Portugal, list of popular representatives in 

the government of, 535 ; annual cost of 

the king of, 595. 
Persigny, Due De, 558. 
Prince Imperial, the, of France, response of, 

at a banquet, 561. 
Pan-Sclavism, one of the great questions of 

Europe, 580. 
Pan-Hellenism, another of the questions 

likely to disturb Europe, 583. 
Pereire, French banker", anecdote of, 602. 
Persia, condition of, 619. 
Pacific Ocean, the, 622; "the fate of the 

Pacific " — Anecdote of Napoleon, 629. 

Q 

Queen of England, her household, 37 ; num- 
ber of troops guarding, and palaces of, 37 ; 
manner of presenting addresses to, 44 ; 
coronation of, 46 ; courtship and marriage 
of, 52 ; children of, 59 ; empire of, 60 ; 
opening parliament, 99 ; veto power of, 
112 ; contrasted with the American "presi- 
dent, 150 ; her maids of honor, 165 ; visit 
of, to Louis Phillippe, 170 ; has a spiritual 
as well as temporal power, 189 ; " clerk of 
the closet" of, 190; the present queen 
thought to be a believer in spiritualism , 
201 ; extract from a speech of, on the re- 
form in the civil service, 230. 

Quaker Meeting, a, 118. 

Quarterly, London, on the acoustics of the 
parliamentary buildings, 118. 

Qulncy, Josiah, on public office, 234. 

IF*. 

Rome, Ancient, population of, Note, 26 ; 
government of by the pope, 594. 

Representatives, House of, American, how 
composed, 120 ; speakers of, 130. 

Representation, inequality of, in England, 
123. 

Reform Bill, the English, effect of its pass- 
age, 124 ; for Ireland and Scotland, Note, 
Vid ; passage of, 181 ; character of, 181 ; 
popular hymn of, 412; popular excite- 
ment preceding the passage of, 418. 

Review, Westminster, the, quotation from, 
on election bribery, 129. 

Reporters, newspaper, 144. 

Review, Saturday, quotation from, on the 
impotency of parliament, 149 ; on the 
radical party, 406. 

Restoration, the, what it means in English 
history, ^J. 

Reformation, the English, 196. 

Ritualism in America, 211. 

Revenue, the American internal, 215. 

Roberts, Mrs., picture of the governor's 
court in India, by, 329. 

Russell, Mr., American correspondent of 
the London Times, quotations from, scenes 
in the Crimean war, 370 ; 372 ; on the 
manners of Americans, 450 ; " legacy " to 
America, 456 ; on the American flag, 457 ; 
on war with America, 464. 



Railway Systems of New York and London 

compared, 469. 
Renan, Ernest, representative of French free 

thinkers, 573. 
Russia, character of the government and 

people of, 590 ; relations of, with America, 

604 ; empire of, 611. 
Rothschilds, the, rise of, 601. 



St. Paul's, London, view from, 24 ; the 
grandest protestant church in the world, 
31 ; cost of, 31. 

Schools of America, superior to English, 35. 

Sussex, Duke of, at the coronation of the 
queen, 43. 

Soult, Marshal, at the coronation of Victo- 
ria, 46. 

Stewart, A. T., income of, 51 ; nomination 
of, for secretary of the treasury, 156 ; a 
hypothetical case, 175 ; scene in front of 
the store of, on Broadway, New York, by 
the author, 438. 

Sovereigns, the English, grand offices 
around, 69 ; smaller offices, the " spoils " 
of the successful party, 70. 

Society, English, anomalous condition of, 
80. 

"Strand, the," in London, 86. 

Senate, the American, modeled after the 
English house of lords, 113 ; physically, a 
fine body of men, 114. 

Speaker, in the house of commons and in 
congress, 115; 119; 128; 131. 

State, in America, how formed, 121. 

Sutton, Mr. Richard, one of our earliest 
short-hand reporters, 135. 

Smalley, Mr. George, quotation from, de- 
scriptive of Castellar's oratory, 141. 

.Stanley, Lord, sketch of, 146. 

Suffrage, Universal, in America and Eng- 
land, 148. 

Seward, Hon. Wm. H., interest taken by, in 
American antiquities, 221 ; sumptuous 
style of, 237 ; describes a visit made by 
him in France to Gen Lafayette, 584. 

Scotland, some individual customs of, 276 ; 
chief cities of, 301 ; national character of 
the people, 395 ; condition of the lower 
orders, 305. 

Sandhurst, English military college of, 453, 

Springfield, American armory at, 370. 

Sprague, Senator, opinion of lawyer poli- 
ticians, 450. 

Switzerland, number of popular represen- 
tatives of, in the government, 534 ; a neu- 
tral ground for the restless spirits of Eu- 
rope, 575 ; government and status of, 593. 

Spain, comparative list of popular represen- 
tatives in the government of, 534 ; the 
Spanish race in America, — Spanish- Ameri- 
can revolutions, 637. 

Sweden, number of popular representatives 
in the government of, 534 ; the first anti- 
slavery state, 638. 

St. Arnaud, sketch of, by Kinglake, 562. 

St. Simon, sketch of, 570. 



INDEX 



663 



Saxony, cost of the king of, to the state, 697. 

San Salvador, 640. 

South America, states of, 642. 

T 

Townsend, G. A., description of an English 
anti-slavery meeting during the war, by, 
421 ; of an incident in Broadway, N. Y., 
by, 433 ; a circumstance at the capitol at 
Washington, 450 ; at the forest of Com- 
peigne, 524. 

Thackeray, Wm. M., quotation from the 
" Newcoines," descriptive of an English 
election scene, 421. 

Thames, the, 27. 

Trollope, Anthony, description of the 
11 white house," 37 ; on the American form 
of government, 188 ; ignorance of, regard- 
ing American state government, 275 ; view 
of American politicians, 276; quotation 
from, on American civic apathy, 449. 

Times, the London, 64 ; 135 ; on the coup 
d^etat of Louis Napoleon, 511. 

Trinity Church, New York, income of, 72 ; 
the original grant of land to, 19-20. 

Tennyson, Alfred, verses by, on Victoria's 
reign ; on Prince of Wales' bride, 711. 

Taylor, General, 233. 

Taylor, Mr. W. G., late Indian commission- 
er at Washington, D. C, interview with 
the author regarding Indian affairs, 33 J. 

Tribune, Chicago, extract from, being a 
table of population of the various great 
powers, 340. 

Treasury Department, various bureaux in 
charge of, 386. 

Tariff, the American, 393. 

Tuckerman, Henry T., his work entitled 
" America and her commentators," com- 
mended, 456 ; on the superior candor of 
French critics on America, 458 ; on Trol- 
lope, the second, 459. 

Thiers, M., the career and character of, 565. 

Talleyrand, Prince, on the policy of Eu- 
rope toward America, 583. 

Turkey, Sultan of, income of, and of his 
chief officers, 595. 

XT 

University, what it is, 122 ; the universities 
of Oxford, Cambridge, London, and Dub- 
lin, represented in parliament, 122. 

Uncle Tom's Cabin, 135. 

Uniformity, Act of, commonly called the 
test act, 197. 

United States, The, judicial system of. 215- 
16 ; imprisonment for debt in, 218 ; insol- 
vent debtors, 219 : agricultural interest in, 
222 ; the timber interest in, 222 ; govern- 
ment advertisements, 224; appointments 
to office in, 232 ; total area of, 319 ; ac- 
quisition of territory by, 335 ; great future 
of, a consequence of the system of govern- 
ment, 339 ; marine of, 362 ; armories and 
arsenals of, 370 ; national debt of, 374 ; 
interest, 376 ; mints of, 384 ; gold coined 



in, and in Europe, 384 ; internal in.provo- 
ments in, 388 ; a comparison between, and 
France, 528 ; proportion of representatives 
in, to the entire population, as compared 
with other countries, 634 ; relations with 
Russia, 604. 

"V 

Viscount, title of, 68. 

Von Bismarck, Count, sketch of, 592. 

Venezuela, 640. 

"VST 

Washington City, description of, 21 ; muni- 
cipal government of, 23 ; Moore's verses 
on, 24 ; compared with European capitals, 
24; during the recess of congress, 148 ; 
public offices in, 213 ; insane asylum of, 
219 ; effect of Jackson's policy on the for- 
tunes of, 234 ; morality of, 242 ; art gal- 
lery of, 262 ; Washington monument, 2o3 ; 
army and navy medical museum in, 359 ; 
treasury building at — the focus of the 
financial operations of the government, 
383 ; a skeleton of Paris, 470 ; bureau of 
education at, 539. 

Wellington. Duke of, present at the birth 
of queen Victoria, 40 ; at the coronation 
of, 46 ; ball given by, 57 : 67 ; action of, 
on the corn-law, 80 ; opposition of, to the 
reform bill, 124 ; his unfitness for govern- 
ment, 157 ; bitterness of, to Lord Grey, 
173 ; an inveterate enemy of the people, 
181 ; great unpopularity of, 185 ; honors 
conferred on, after Waterloo, 357. 

William, of Normandy , unable to read,66; his 
armament on the invasion of England, 358. 

Wales, Prince of, state bulletin announcing 
birth of, 58 ; titles of, by inheritance, 49. 

Wade, John, an English historian, 69; 123. 

Westminster Palace, bad site of, 88 ; his- 
tory of, 91. 

Westminster, Marquis of, extent of his es- 
tate, and how acquired, 72; income of; 
country seats of, 72. 

Wolsey, Cardinal, 76. 

Willis, N. P., description by, of English 
high life, 77. 

West, Benjamin, 81. 

Walter, Thomas W., American architect, 84. 

Whitehall, in England, 87. 

William the Fourth, anecdote of, 103. 

Washburne, E. B., Mr., at the head of a 
movement to connect the telegraph and 
post-office, 227. 

Welles, Gideon, an efficient officer, 237. 

West Point, 351. 

Wall Street, the great American mart tor 
loans and banking, 385. 

Watson, Elkanah, on the progressive in- 
crease of the American population, 463. 

Wurtemburg, King of, income of, 595. 



Yelverton, Mrs., 110. 
York, Archbishop of, 189. 



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